SpeakAP- National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored research!

This application is for everyone who wants to improve or learn American English pronunciation.

Students, teachers, Speech Language Pathologists and linguists can use the detailed signal processing for educational purposes.

SpeakAP is grounded in research supported by the National Science Foundation and developed in conjunction with linguists and speech research scientists.

Use automated scoring and analysis to compare your accent, articulation and pronunciation to the reference speech.

Listen and Record

Listen to the word, look at the syllable break-down, record your pronunciation and play your recording.

Over 400 words available in the wordlist with varying complexities of monophones, diphonse and triphones for comprehensive learning.

Use the listen-record-play feature to practice learning the correct pronunciation.

Analyze

Press Analyze button, to compare your pronunciation performance with respect to the reference utterance.

Novel algorithms process your speech to provide a similarity score for each of the THREE primary components of spoken American English (articulation, energy and speaking rate) and analysis of the FIVE speech characteristics of 1) phonetics, 2) speaking rate, 3) stress, 4) pitch and 5) intonation.

1) Phonetics

Understand the underlying phonemic structure of the word by examining the visual plot for every word in the lists.

The Phone key provides the phoneme and its position in the word is shown by the segments marked by white lines on the plot of the reference audio signal.

2) Speaking rate

An acoustic plot of the reference audio side-by-side with your recording provides a easy way to visualize the word and differences.

The visual cue allows you to compare your speaking rate and match the reference audio during your next attempt.

3) Stress

Visually compare the stress as measured by the energy in different parts of your speech segment to that of reference.

This prosodic feature is important in making your pronunciation more similar to American English. A closer match indicates improvement.

4) Pitch

Study differences in pitch changes with time with an easy comparison to the reference utterance allows you to see subtle differences that are important to accent.

SpeakAP uses the most accurate pitch measurement available in the market.

Note: The absolute pitch value will be different for male and female users but the important information for pronunciation is in the relative change in pitch with time.

5) Intonation

Study the changes in your speech intonation with time compared to the reference signal.

The prosodic feature of intonation is responsible for the particular American accent and pronunciation.

Similarity score

Provides scores summarizing the comparison of the three primary components of spoken American English with respect to the reference pronunciation. Higher scores indicate more similar pronunciation characteristics.

Articulation- movements of the physical biological articulators responsible for sound creation.
Energy- Stress and intonation produced from particular vocal dynamics.
Speaking rate- speed in which sounds are spoken (articulated.)