ClaritySpeech: Dementia Obfuscation in Speech

TL;DR

ClaritySpeech is a novel framework that obfuscates dementia-affected speech to improve privacy and accessibility by integrating ASR, text obfuscation, and zero-shot TTS without fine-tuning.

Contribution

It introduces a new dementia obfuscation system that preserves speaker identity and enhances speech quality in low-data environments, addressing privacy and accessibility challenges.

Findings

Achieves 16% and 10% reduction in F1 score across settings

Improves WER from 0.73 to 0.08 and 0.15

Enhances speech quality from 1.65 to ~2.15

Abstract

Dementia, a neurodegenerative disease, alters speech patterns, creating communication barriers and raising privacy concerns. Current speech technologies, such as automatic speech transcription (ASR), struggle with dementia and atypical speech, further challenging accessibility. This paper presents a novel dementia obfuscation in speech framework, ClaritySpeech, integrating ASR, text obfuscation, and zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) to correct dementia-affected speech while preserving speaker identity in low-data environments without fine-tuning. Results show a 16% and 10% drop in mean F1 score across various adversarial settings and modalities (audio, text, fusion) for ADReSS and ADReSSo, respectively, maintaining 50% speaker similarity. We also find that our system improves WER (from 0.73 to 0.08 for ADReSS and 0.15 for ADReSSo) and speech quality from 1.65 to ~2.15, enhancing privacy and accessibility.