SpeakRite: Monitoring Speaking Rate in Real Time on a Mobile Phone

There has been an increase in spoken interaction between people from different geographies or different cultural background prominently in the call center scenario. Noticeably, ineffectiveness of conversations is prominent when two people, from different cultures, converse in a language common to them. One of the main reason for conversation ineffectiveness is driven by the way conversation is spoken and not so much by what is being spoken. Speaking rate is a critical factor affecting intelligibility and comprehension of speech. In this paper, we present SpeakRite - a real-time mobile application that assists and guides a person to converse at the right speed by analyzing his spoken speech. As its main function, SpeakRite analyzes the speaking rate during a telephone conversation and provides a real time feedback to assist the speaker modify his speaking rate. Additionally, it also provides an offline analysis of the speaking rate variations in a recorded call. The authors discuss a real time implementation for monitoring speaking rate on a mobile phone device.