Speech adventure

Children with cleft palate or lip learn to speak in a way that compensates for the cleft. Their speech becomes unintelligible even after surgery to correct the cleft. Most children undergo speech therapy for many years after the surgery. The boring nature of the cleft speech therapy often causes children to abandon home exercises. We posit that a game that can effectively motivate these children to practice at home would speed up recovery. However, currently, very little has been done in gaining an understanding of the children's, parents' and speech pathologists' needs and requirements. This paper discusses the design and development of the speech recognition system. From this work we developed a speech recognition system capable of detecting the omissions, substitutions, and compensations characteristic in cleft speech with extremely high accuracy.