Generating Speech Material for Auditory Training Exercises Using ChatGPT Chatbot

Hearing rehabilitation is a complex process comprised of various types of interventions. One of them, auditory training, is commonly offered to adults with hearing loss that either underwent cochlear implant surgery or adapt with difficulty to the prescribed behind-the-ear hearing aid. During this type of intervention, speech material saturated with phonemes of different spectral characteristics is presented to the patient. In this paper, text analysis and generation capabilities offered by the OpenAI’s state-of-the-art GPT-4 model-based ChatGPT chatbot were assessed under a set of explicitly stated Croatian language rules and strict phonetic criteria, with the final objective of novel speech material generation. The results indicate that the chatbot can successfully generate isolated words of standard Croatian language for two target phoneme classes at saturation levels up to 80 %, and for the remaining three classes at levels up to 60 %. Moreover, as much as 90 % of sentences that it generated at the 50 % saturation level satisfy the stated phonetic criteria and, even though generally void of meaning, adhere to the Croatian language rules and, thus, can be used for auditory training exercises.