Power-saving Reproduction Algorithm for Speech Signals

Power consumption is one of the important issues for portable electronic devices. The authors have previously proposed a power-saving audio reproduction algorithm based on auditory masking. In this paper, the feasibility of the power-saving audio playback algorithm is confirmed towards speech signals in the viewpoints of both speech intelligibility and power consumption. The influence of the speech conversion for power-saving playback was quantified as the word intelligibility. In practice, the word intelligibility was measured in each of six phoneme categories for the converted speech signals of which the reduction rate of power consumption was set at 20 %, 50 %, and 70 %. It is confirmed that the word intelligibility does not decrease drastically for the converted speech of which the reduction rate of power consumption was set at 50%.