Cross-device and test-retest reliability of speech acoustic measurements derived from consumer-grade mobile recording devices

In recent years, there has been growing interest in remote speech assessment through automated speech acoustic analysis. While the reliability of widely used features has been validated in professional recording settings, it remains unclear how the heterogeneity of consumer-grade recording devices, commonly used in nonclinical settings, impacts the reliability of these measurements. To address this issue, we systematically investigated the cross-device and test-retest reliability of classical speech acoustic measurements in a sample of healthy Chinese adults using consumer-grade equipment across three popular speech tasks: sustained phonation (SP), diadochokinesis (DDK), and picture description (PicD). A total of 51 participants completed two recording sessions spaced at least 24 hours apart. Speech outputs were recorded simultaneously using four devices: a voice recorder, laptop, tablet, and smartphone. Our results demonstrated good reliability for fundamental frequency and cepstral peak prominence in the SP task across testing sessions and devices. Other features from the SP and PicD tasks exhibited acceptable test-retest reliability, except for the period perturbation quotient from the tablet and formant frequency from the smartphone. However, measures from the DDK task showed a significant decrease in reliability on consumer-grade recording devices compared to professional devices. These findings indicate that the lower recording quality of consumer-grade equipment may compromise the reproducibility of syllable rate estimation, which is critical for DDK analysis. This study underscores the need for standardization of remote speech monitoring methodologies to ensure that remote home assessment provides accurate and reliable results for early screening.