Index:

User Satisfaction Assessment

We will be assessing clinician and user satisfaction, both with the process of creating their synthesized voices and in the resulting synthesized voice by administering a survey. Questions will address the intelligibility of the synthesizer, the naturalness of sentence intonation and rhythm, the sound quality of the voice, etc. Through this survey we also hope to identifying talker/voice characteristics which tend to work poorly with this technology. Hopefully this will enable us to fix problems with the technology. However, if we are unable to fix the system, we will be able to warn prospective users with voice characteristics that may prove difficult. The survey is also intended to assess the voice creation process specific to ModelTalker.

Clinicians, users of the AAC devices, and their family members and friends will all be asked to complete the survey. From clinicians we hope to determine how viable clinicians view this process and the resulting synthetic speech. From users we hope to assess user satisfaction with the process of generating a personalized voice and with the resulting synthetic speech. From family members and friends we hope to determine the attitudes of family members, friends, and others toward the ModelTalker synthesis technology.