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Elderly-friendly speaking stylesSelecting voice and words for better understandability 
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We investigate both word and voice selection to clarify elderly-friendly speaking styles. Previously, there has been no recommendation beyond "speak loudly and slowly" nor any explanation of where and how to make such changes. We select exemplar speakers, whom the elderly consider easiest to understand, from among elderly service workers and qualified personnel. Through the interviews with the exemplar speakers and analysis of elderly directed speech data uttered by the exemplar speakers, we clarify some of the detailed features of elderly-friendly speaking styles. This work provides important new insight into the practice of elderly-friendly speaking. We aim to clarify knowledge about elderly-friendly speaking styles that might be tacit knowledge among the exemplar speakers and open the knowledge to everyone for practical use. Moreover, we aim to realize richer communication between the elderly and the artificial intelligence (AI) that has learned elderly-friendly speaking styles.
[1] H. Nakajima, Y. Aono, “Collection and analyses of exemplary speech data to establish easy-to-understand speech synthesis for Japanese elderly adults,” in Proc. 23rd Conference of the Oriental COCOSDA International Committee for the Co-ordination and Standardisation of Speech Databases and Assessment Techniques (O-COCOSDA), pp. 145–150, 2020 (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9295000).
[2] H. Nakajima, N. Miyazaki, S. Sakauchi, “Pause length analysis between utterances to elderly people,” in Proc. 2015 Autumn Meeting Acoustical Society of Japan, pp. 399–400, 2015.
Hideharu Nakajima / Interaction Research Group, Innovative Communication Laboratory
Email: cs-openhouse-ml@hco.ntt.co.jp