What is Speech Assessment and Why it Matters
by Qiusi, Product Manager of SpeechSuper What is Speech Assessment Speech assessment is the process of giving algorithm-based corrective feedback for speaking activities in language learning. It's also sometimes called pronunciation assessment. Speech Assessment 101 Speech assessment is largely based on the "Goodness of Pronunciation" (GoP) algorithm developed over 20 years. While automatic speech recognition (ASR) aims to decode the best possible option of acoustic model and language model combined derived from data in a specified language, GoP only cares about the acoustic model with the language model pre-defined, hence producing an acoustic likeliness score measuring “how similar a speech sounds like compared to native speakers of a particular language”, which, in short, is pronunciation. Simply put, for speech assessment, the input is speech audio + reference text, and the output is a score of pronunciation. Evolution of Speech Assessment Over the past decades, th