Objective: In this study, an objective version of the postlaryngectomy telephone test (PLTT) for measuring speech intelligibility based on automatic speech recognition is presented.
Methods: Thirty-one patients with tracheoesophageal substitute voice (25 men and six women, 63.4+/-8.7 years) were evaluated by 11 naïve listeners. The automatic measurement of speech intelligibility was expressed by means of word accuracy and word recognition rates, or the percentage of correctly recognized words from a word sequence. These automatic measures were compared with the subjectively obtained PLTT values.
Results: The average PLTT intelligibility of the 11 naïve listeners was 47%; the automatically obtained word accuracy and word recognition rates were much lower (approximately 0% and 15%, respectively). The correlation between subjective and automatic evaluation, however, reached more than 0.9 in some of the examined cases.
Conclusion: Automatic speech recognition provides an efficient, objective measure that is equivalent to the overall PLTT intelligibility value.