Methods for measuring speech intelligibility, and related systems and apparatus

A system comprising:

• one or more computers and one or more storage devices storing instructions that are operable, when executed by the one or more computers, to cause the one or more computers to perform operations comprising:
• receiving an acoustic signal encoding an utterance of a user, wherein the utterance comprises a verbalization of a sample text by the user;
• generating, by an automatic speech recognition (ASR) module, an N-best output corresponding to the utterance, wherein the N-best output comprises N recognition results generated by the ASR module for the utterance, wherein N is a positive integer;
• and
• generating an intelligibility score representing an intelligibility of the utterance based, at least in part, on the N-best output and the sample text, wherein:
• (1) N is at least 2,
• (2) the generating of the intelligibility score is further based on a confidence score, wherein the confidence score indicates a probability that a particular one of the recognition results is a correct transcription of the utterance, and/or
• (3) the generating of the intelligibility score is further based on a pronunciation score for the utterance, wherein the pronunciation score indicates an extent to which the utterance exhibits correct pronunciation of the sample text.

A computer storage medium having instructions stored thereon that, when executed by a data processing apparatus, cause the data processing apparatus to perform operations comprising:

• receiving an acoustic signal encoding an utterance of a user, wherein the utterance comprises a verbalization of a sample text by the user;
• generating, by an automatic speech recognition (ASR) module, an N-best output corresponding to the utterance, wherein the N-best output comprises N recognition results generated by the ASR module for the utterance, wherein N is a positive integer;
• and
• generating an intelligibility score representing an intelligibility of the utterance based, at least in part, on the N-best output and the sample text, wherein:
• (1) N is at least 2,
• (2) the generating of the intelligibility score is further based on a confidence score, wherein the confidence score indicates a probability that a particular one of the recognition results is a correct transcription of the utterance, and/or
• (3) the generating of the intelligibility score is further based on a pronunciation score for the utterance, wherein the pronunciation score indicates an extent to which the utterance exhibits correct pronunciation of the sample text.