Alice from Yandex has become better at understanding users with speech disabilities

Yandex is working on providing voices for the Alice assistant, especially for users with speech disabilities.

For example, the digital assistant now understands speech with stuttering, cerebral palsy, consequences of stroke or injury. This became possible thanks to additional training of neural networks: it is worth thousands of audio recordings based on people with speech defects, which Yandex involves in open quality testing.

The gap between normal speech principles and changes was reduced by an average of 20%. Quality of measurement by the Word Error Rate (WER) metric.

An example of the updated Alice in action:

The project involved non-profit organizations such as the Center for Curative Pedagogics, Live Now, Life’s Path, Spring, Perspective, Best Friends and others. Their wards and other test participants recorded more than 855 thousand tongue twisters and fragments of ordinary speech — this is more than 900 hours of audio materials. Defectologists from Moscow State Pedagogical Univ. helped classify the samples according to such parameters. More than 300 people took part in the project.

This is not the first Yandex project to adapt a virtual assistant for people with disabilities. 15 services and products have been adapted for invisible users: Search, Browser, Yandex Music, Bookmate and others. Kinopoisk has films with audio descriptions and SDH subtitles, and the Go app has special features for people with disabilities.