El-WOZ: a client-server wizard-of-oz interface

In this paper, we present a speech recording interface developed in the context of a project on automatic speech recognition for elderly native speakers of European Portuguese. In order to collect spontaneous speech in a situation of interaction with a machine, this interface was designed as a Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) plateform. In this setup, users interact with a fake automated dialog system controled by a human wizard. It was implemented as a client-server application and the subjects interact with a talking head. The human wizard chooses pre-defined questions or sentences in a graphical user interface, which are then synthesized and spoken aloud by the avatar on the client side. A small spontaneous speech corpus was collected in a daily center. Eight speakers between 75 and 90 years old were recorded. They appreciated the interface and felt at ease with the avatar. Manual orthographic transcriptions were created for the total of about 45 minutes of speech.