The promise of speech technology for health applications is profound and is becoming more mature recently. Advancements in core speech technologies and their integration – ranging from automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS)/voice conversion (VC), speech enhancement (SE), and paralinguistic speech processing (PSP) – offer novel tools for both scientific discovery and creating innovative solutions for clinical screening, diagnostics, intervention supports and beyond. Credited to the potential for widespread impact, research sites across all continents are actively engaged in this important research area. This short course aims to provide an overview of these existing and potential opportunities of speech- based solutions in healthcare together with foundational background of these four major speech technologies (ASR, TTS/VC, SE, PSP) and an array of healthcare applications where such latest technological development plays a key role, together with a hands-on session on automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for dysarthric speech.

Attendees of this course will get to know the roles that speech technologies such as speech enhancement (SE), ASR, paralinguistic speech processing (PSP), text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) as well as voice conversion (VC) play in a variety of healthcare applications. This course will also do a deep dive into each of the technologies to address how some of the challenges in healthcare applications are addressed including data scarcity, interoperability, and cultural & language barriers. State-of-the art solutions in healthcare applications using ASR, TTS/VC, SE, and PSP will also be covered. Finally, through the lecture materials as well as the hands-on session, the attendees would learn relevant toolboxes and get to know about the open-source datasets to learn using the concepts tutored even after this short course.