A Crowdsourced Speech Intelligibility Test that Agrees with, Has Higher Repeatability than, Lab Tests

Stephen D. Voran; Andrew A. Catellier

Abstract: Crowdsourcing of subjective speech, audio, and video quality of experience (QoE) tests has received much interest and study, but crowdsourcing of speech intelligibility testing has not. We hypothesize that speech intelligibility tests offer a unique crowdsourcing opportunity because, unlike QoE testing, each trial has a correct answer. That allows us to motivate and evaluate listeners. We describe the design, implementation, and analysis of a Crowdsourced Modified Rhyme Test (CMRT) that replicates our recent Laboratory MRT (LMRT) work. Our results show that CMRT results are more repeatable than LMRT results, CMRT repeats LMRT better than LMRT repeats itself, and application of a simple listener selection rule produces per-condition CMRT results that almost exactly agree with reference LMRT results.

Keywords: modified rhyme test (MRT); speech intelligibility; subjective test; crowdsource

(TM-17-523.pdf)

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