Speech recognition as a supportive tool in the speech therapy game

Communication is crucial for humans and significantly affects their quality of life. Speech and hearing disorders result in communication and social limitations. Therefore, early diagnosis and treatment are essential. In addition to traditional methods, new supportive tools using speech analysis technologies are also helpful. This work focuses on the role of speech recognition technology in speech therapy for children with pronunciation disorders. A simple web game was designed to improve pronunciation of phonemes through children's rhymes. The game takes place on a game board where the player moves their token after correctly reciting a rhyme. The pronunciation is recorded and recognized by the system, which determines the level of agreement with the original. This score is then converted into the number of spaces the player can move. To improve the recognition of children's speech, a model was trained on a children's speech corpus, as conventional systems are optimized for adults. The newly trained model significantly improved the accuracy of speech recognition. The game increases children's motivation to practice pronunciation at home thanks to its playful elements and user-friendly interface.