Speaking with a KN95 Face Mask: ASR Performance and Speaker Compensation

The increasing prevalence of face masks in the United States due to the COVID-19 pandemic necessitates serious consideration of the functional impact of wearing a mask on speech. This study considers how the presence of a KN95 mask affects the performance of a commercial ASR system, Google Cloud Speech. We present evidence that wearing a mask does not impact ASR performance at the sentence level. Moreover, speakers may be naturally adapting to the mask by increasing their vowel space area. However, when speakers intentionally altered their speech by speaking clearly or loudly (though not slowly), ASR performance improved. These findings suggest that ASR users can employ speech strategies to achieve better ASR results when wearing a mask. Beyond healthy speakers, our study has implications for mask-wearing ASR users with otherwise reduced speech intelligibility.