ViSTAFAE: A Visual Speech-Training Aid with Feedback of Articulatory Efforts

An app is presented as a speech-training aid for providing visual feedback of articulatory efforts using information obtained from the utterances’ audiovisual recording. It has two panels to enable comparison between the articulatory efforts of the learner and the teacher or a pre-recorded reference speaker. The visual feedback consists of a slow-motion animation of lateral vocal tract shape, level, and pitch, and time-aligned display of the frontal view of the speaker’s face along with playback of the time-scaled speech signal. The app comprises a graphical user interface and modules for signal acquisition, analysis, and animation. It is developed using Python as a Windows-based app and may be accessed remotely through a web browser.