Can you understand him? Let's look at his word accuracy-automatic evaluation of tracheoesophageal speech

Tracheoesophageal (TE) speech is a possibility to restore the ability to speak after laryngectomy. TE speech often shows low intelligibility. An objective means to determine and quantify the intelligibility does not exist until now and an automation of this procedure is desirable. We used a speech recognizer trained on normal, non-pathologic voices. We compared intelligibility scores for TE speech from five experienced raters with the word accuracy (WA) of our speech recognizer. A correlation coefficient of -0.84 shows that WA can be a good indicator of intelligibility for pathologic voices. An outlook for future work is presented.