A new method for testing communication efficiency and user acceptability of speech communication channels

The performance of speech communication channels featuring long delay times is usually subjectively experienced as lower than similar channels without delay. Yet most conventional speech intelligibility and speech quality tests are not sensitive to the effects of delay. Moreover, these conventional test do not take the effects of human compensating strategies into account, which help cope with adverse communication conditions by adapting our speech. Test types that do incorporate such effects are sometimes known as ‘speech communicability’ tests. Based on the lessons learned from literature on speech communicability testing, a list of requirements for the design of a good communicability test method was composed, followed by the actual design of a new test method combining attractive features of existing communicability tests. The suitability of the test design was verified by conducting a pilot experiment. The results of this experiment show that the new method is capable of measuring efficiency and acceptability, and is sufficiently sensitive to delay and background noise.