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The audio version of this article is generated by text-to-speech, a technology based on artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
Olivia Daub\u2019s two-year-old son is obsessed with \u201cdoodidees.\u201d He talks about them and screams for them at 5 a.m. every day.<\/p>\n
Daub said most people don\u2019t have a clue what her son is saying, but she knows to bring him the tiny, dark blue fruit that he actually wants: blueberries.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve all been children and we\u2019ve all had the experience of not being understood by adults. Inversely, we [adults] have all had a really hard time understanding children because they produce speech and language in ways that are different from adults.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Daub, an assistant professor in Western University’s school of communication sciences and disorders in London, Ont., said understanding toddler-speak is even trickier for artificial intelligence (AI). That\u2019s why she is leading new research on how AI can better understand the way toddlers talk.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Daub said that while automatic speech recognition software, such as automatic closed captions on Zoom meetings and Amazon\u2019s Alexa virtual assistant, has become good at recognizing adult speech, it still struggles to accurately pick up what young children are saying.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Soodeh Nikan is an assistant professor in Western University’s electrical and computer engineering department who studies artificial intelligence. She is working on training an AI model to better understand toddlers’ speech. (Submitted by Soodeh Nikan)<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we\u2019ve all seen YouTube clips of a toddler asking Alexa to play a song, and getting something completely different and really inappropriate,\u201d she said. \u201cThis study is trying to understand how we can leverage AI and machine-learning principles to improve recognition for toddlers and preschoolers.\u201d<\/p>\n
To do that, she\u2019s working with Western electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Soodeh Nikan to train an AI model on toddlers\u2019 common speech patterns and shortcuts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMost of the speech models that we have are trained with adult speech, so that\u2019s why most of these models are not very successful in recognizing that toddler speech, especially the mistakes that they make,\u201d Nikan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to provide examples to AI [for it] to be able to understand and distinguish normal mistakes and speech disorder problems.”<\/p>\n
How the study will work<\/p>\n
Daub plans to bring in a sample of 30 children to play, tell stories and speak to research assistants. Each session will be recorded and transcribed by humans, who will also collect data on children\u2019s speaking patterns.<\/p>\n
One common pattern, Daub said, is that many English-speaking toddlers struggle to pronounce the \u201cr\u201d sound and instead use a \u201cw\u201d sound.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Data like this will be handed over to Nikan, who will feed the information into a private AI model in order to train it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can fine-tune these models using the data that is specifically annotated for this purpose,\u201d said Nikan, adding the AI model will also be trained with some data from already-existing OpenAI online.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Daub and her team have so far met with nine toddlers and are still seeking more study participants.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Clinical and everyday uses for AI model<\/p>\n
While the research is in its early stages, Daub and Nikan said their goal is to train an AI model that can be used in a clinical setting, helping speech language pathologists analyze and transcribe what kids are saying.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019ll ever be 100 per cent accurate unless we\u2019re following children around for 24 hours a day \u2026 but I think we can get a lot closer than where we are at,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Down the line, Daub said, if AI can better understand preschoolers, it could improve tools such as closed captioning and voice-activated accessibility software, while also allowing kids more space to play with technology.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can think really creatively about what these little people can contribute to society. They\u2019re not just consumers of the world around them. Giving them access to technology is an important consideration too,\u201d Daub said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 4 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by text-to-speech, a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":297529,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-297528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297528\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/297529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}