Dr. Amelia Taylor

Dr. Amelia Taylor

Co-author

Computing & Information Technology

19 publications

Amelia Taylor is a lecturer in Artificial Intelligence at the Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences, former the University of Malawi, the Polytechnic. She teaches Artificial Intelligence, Computational Intelligence and programming modules. In addition, she teaches and supervises MSc and...

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A Voice-Based Personal Assistant for Mental Health in Kreol Morisien

Journal Article
Published 10 months ago, 291 views
Author
B. Gobin-Rahimbux
Co-authors
N. Gooda Sahib, N. Peerthy,, Dr. Amelia Taylor
Abstract
Voice-based smart personal assistants (VSPAs) are applications that recognize speech-based input and perform a task. In many domains, VSPA can play an important role as it mimics an interaction with another human. For low-resource languages, developing a VSPA can be challenging due to the lack of available audio datasets. In this work, a VSPA in Kreol Morisien (KM), the native language of Mauritius, is proposed to support users with mental health issues. Seven conversational flows were considered, and two speech recognition models were developed using CMUSphinx and DeepSpeech, respectively. A comparative user evaluation was conducted with 17 participants who were requested to speak 151 sentences of varying lengths in KM. It was observed that DeepSpeech was more accurate with a word error rate (WER) of 18% compared to CMUSphinx at 24%, that is, DeepSpeech fully recognized 76 sentences compared to CMUSphinx where only 57 sentences were fully recognized. However, DeepSpeech could not fully recognize any 7-word sentences, and thus, it was concluded that the contributions of DeepSpeech to automatic speech recognition in KM should be further explored. Nevertheless, this research is a stepping stone towards developing more VSPA to support various activities among the Mauritian population.
Year of Publication
2023
Journal Name
Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Volume
2023
Issue
1
Page Numbers
5532967
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