Application of an Isolated Word Speech Recognition System in the Field of Mental Health Consultation: Development and Usability Study

Background Speech recognition is a technology that enables machines to understand human language. Objective In this study, speech recognition of isolated words from a small vocabulary was applied to the field of mental health counseling. Methods A software platform was used to establish a human-machine chat for psychological counselling. The software uses voice recognition technology to decode the user's voice information. The software system analyzes and processes the user's voice information according to many internal related databases, and then gives the user accurate feedback. For users who need psychological treatment, the system provides them with psychological education. Results The speech recognition system included features such as speech extraction, endpoint detection, feature value extraction, training data, and speech recognition. Conclusions The Hidden Markov Model was adopted, based on multithread programming under a VC2005 compilation environment, to realize the parallel operation of the algorithm and improve the efficiency of speech recognition. After the design was completed, simulation debugging was performed in the laboratory. The experimental results showed that the designed program met the basic requirements of a speech recognition system.