An Automatic Intelligibility Test: Based on the Post-laryngectomy Telephone Test

In voice and speech therapy, there exist a lot of standardized and well proven tests for voice and speech assessment. However, these tests are usually performed by a single physician and the result is sometimes only quality changed" or "quality unchanged". Furthermore they are dependent on the physician's current state and mood so the same test might yield different results if performed twice or by different physicians. A standardized automatic and objective test could provide a useful tool to support the diagnosis and treatment and can aid the evaluation of different therapy methods. The Post-Laryngectomy Telephone Test (PLTT) is a standardized intelligibility test for patients with substitute voices who lost their natural voice due to a partial or total laryngectomy. This work introduces an automatic and objective version of the PLTT. The reliability of the system is backed up by a clinical study incorporating 32 test sessions of patients with tracheoesophageal substitute voice evaluated by 11 naive human listeners."