An approach for Correcting the Word-level Mispronunciations for non-native English-speaking Indian Children

Speech Recognition and its potential applications in terms of "talking devices" have become indispensable in today's world. Technological advances like mobiles, smart home assistants or tablets extensively use the techniques of automatic speech recognition that works good for adults but cannot always follow and understand children's speech. The primary goal of this paper is to bridge the gap of communication between voice assistants and Indian children speaking English as secondary language. The issue of lack of children's speech corpora with English as non-native language, is addressed by creating a dataset of children in the age group of 5-15 years, speaking Hindi or Marathi as their mother tongue and English as their second language. The analysis and implementation of the proposed work shows the accuracy of approximately 96% and potential for further scope by increasing the size of dataset in lower age group. The key contributions of our work are (i) creating speech dataset of Indian children whose mother-tongue is Hindi or Marathi, (ii) employing and evaluating hybrid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) as an age classifier, (iii) language modeling to customize children vocabulary, (iv) checking accuracy and performance of the system.