Frida Norling

Sara Avén

A novel Skype interface with virtual speech reading support

– field trials in the MonAMI project

Abstract

Lipreading has a very important part of our way of communicate with other persons to make it easier to understand. SynFace is a system that eases the talk over telephone for persons with hearing aids. The persons will se an animated face on a computer whose lip movements is synchronized with the incoming speech.

The purpose of this thesis has been to find out whether or not people with hearing aids are being helped by using SynFace for conversations over telephone. We have worked close to Jonas Beskow and Samer Al Mobayed on the Speech, Music and Hearing institution at Royal Institute of Technology for this evaluation of SynFace.

During the studies we have used qualitative methods by having two testweeks with few testpersons. We also had a focus group to evaluate how the attitude was with the people who not wanted to be in the testgroups but were potential users.

The results showed that elderly persons attitude to aids, like SynFace, is not that positive. It has been shown that the integration between older people and basic technical equipment not is to prefer. The testpersons used SynFace in their home for about a week and the results showed that there is a big problem already when the elderly people interact with the computer because of their missing competens and experience of using computers.

The results show that the animated face and the lip movements are of very good quality but that we had the wrong test group, they do not find any interest in such aid as SynFace.