“Alice” has undergone additional training and now better understands the requests of users with speech disabilities

Users with speech difficulties, for example, stuttering, cerebral palsy, consequences of a stroke or injury, will now find it easier to communicate with the Alice voice assistant, since after additional training of the neural network it began to better recognize their requests, Yandex writes.

Image source: Yandex

In the process of additional training, more than 900 hours of audio materials were used, containing over 855 thousand tongue twisters and voice fragments, which were recorded by people with speech disorders. The project was attended by non-profit organizations “Center for Curative Pedagogy”, “Live Now”, “Life Path”, “Spring”, “Perspective”, “Best Friends” and others, as well as speech pathologists from Moscow State Pedagogical University, who helped classify the content according to types of violations. In total, more than 300 people participated in the project.

Thanks to this, the gap in the accuracy of Alice’s recognition of normal speech and distorted speech was reduced by an average of 20%. The quality of recognition was assessed using the Word Error Rate (WER) metric, which allows you to determine the proportion of misunderstood words.

The company reported that this is not the first project to adapt a virtual assistant for people with special needs. She recently presented inclusive Alice skills developed by students in Moscow. And the “Home with Alice” mobile application now supports reading text from the screen aloud, making it easier for users with visual impairments to interact with the interface. 15 Yandex services and products have been adapted for such users, including Search, Browser, Yandex Music, Bookmate, etc. The Go app also has accessibility features for people with disabilities, including features like Text Only, Hear, Don’t Talk, Carry a Guide Dog, Be in a Wheelchair, or Help Find a Car “