Individuality-Preserving Speech Synthesis for Spinal Muscular Atrophy with a Tracheotomy

Aphasia and dysarthria are the two main language disorders that cause difficulty in speech. This study focuses on articulation disorders, particularly among individuals with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) whose speech is challenging to comprehend. Specifically, it addresses communication support through text-to-speech synthesis technology that maintains the speaker’s individuality. Previous research on individuals with SMA who have undergone tracheotomy surgery has predominantly centered on postoperative care environments unrelated to speech communication, with few precedents in the study of communication support using speech synthesis technology. Therefore, this study aims to develop a speech synthesis system that preserves the speaker’s individuality while producing clearer speech. This is performed by fine-tuning a pre-trained speech synthesis model, initially trained on a large corpus of speech by those with no speech impediment, using a small amount of speech of the target person with SMA. Subjective evaluations using both actual and synthesized speech demonstrated that the system could adequately learn the speaker’s individuality and produce synthesized speech with slightly improved clarity.