Given the high prevalence of mental disorders and the significant diagnostic delays and difficulties in patient follow-up, voice biomarkers hold the promise of improving access to care and therapeutic follow-up for people with psychiatric disorders. Yet, despite many years of successful research in the field, none of these voice biomarkers are implemented in clinical practice. Beyond the reductive explanation of the lack of explainability of the involved machine learning systems, we look for arguments in the epistemology and sociology of psychiatry. We show that the estimation of diagnoses, the major task in the literature, is of little interest to both clinicians and patients. After tackling the common misbeliefs about diagnosis in psychiatry in a didactic way, we propose a paradigm shift towards the estimation of clinical symptoms and signs, which not only address the limitations raised against diagnosis estimation but also enable the formulation of new machine learning tasks. We hope that this paradigm shift will empower the use of vocal biomarkers in clinical practice. It is however conditional on a change in database labeling practices, but also on a profound change in the speech processing community’s practices towards psychiatry.

Following patients with chronic sleep disorders involves multiple appointments between doctors and patients which often results in episodic follow-ups with unevenly spaced interviews. Speech technologies and virtual doctors can help improve this follow-up. However, there are still some challenges to overcome: sleepiness measurements are diverse and are not always correlated, and most past research focused on detecting nstantaneous sleepiness levels of healthy sleep-deprived subjects. This article presents a large database to assess the sleepiness level of highly phenotyped patients that complain from excessive daytime sleepiness. Based on the Multiple Sleep Latency Test, it differs from existing databases by multiple aspects. First, it is omposed of recordings from patients suffering from excessive daytime sleepiness instead of sleep deprived healthy subjects. Second, it incites the subjects to sleep contrary to existing stressing sleepiness deprivation experimental paradigms. Third, the sleepiness level of the patients is evaluated with different temporal granularities - long term sleepiness and short term sleepiness - and both objective and subjective sleepiness measures are collected. Finally, it relies on the recordings of 94 highly phenotyped patients, allowing to unravel the influences of different physical factors (age, sex, weight, ... ) on voice.

La détection automatique de la somnolence peut aider le suivi de patients souffrant de maladies neuro-psychiatriques chroniques. Des recherches précédentes ont déjà montré que cela est possible en utilisant des enregistrements vocaux. Dans cet article, nous proposons d’étudier les erreurs de lecture effectuées par des patients souffrant de Somnolence Diurne Excessive (SDE) sur le corpus TILE, enregistré à l’hôpital de Bordeaux. Avec des orthophonistes, nous avons défini et compté les erreurs de lecture des patients et les avons confrontées aux différentes mesures de somnolence du corpus. Nous montrons ici que relever ces erreurs peut être utile pour élaborer des marqueurs robustes de la somnolence objective mais aussi pour définir des critères d’exclusion des locuteurs n’ayant pas un niveau de lecture suffisant.

Le suivi des patients souffrant de maladies neuro-psychiatriques chroniques peut être amélioré grâce à la détection de la somnolence dans la voix. Cet article s’inspire des systèmes état-de-l’art en détection de la somnolence dans la voix pour le cas particulier de patients atteints de Somnolence Diurne Excessive (SDE). Pour cela, nous basons notre étude sur un nouveau corpus, le corpus TILE. Il diffère des autres corpora existants par le fait que les sujets enregistrés sont des patients souffrant de SDE et que leur niveau de somnolence est mesuré de manière subjective mais aussi objective. Le système proposé permet détecter la somnolence objective grâce à des paramètres vocaux simples et explicables à des non spécialistes.

In this paper, we investigate the acoustic properties of phonemes in three speaking styles: read speech, prepared speech and spontaneous speech. Our aim is to better understand why speech recognition systems still fails to achieve good performances on spontaneous speech. This work follows the work of Nakamura et al. on Japanese speaking styles, with the difference that we here focus on French. Using Nakamura's method, we use classical speech recognition features, MFCC, and try to represent the effects of the speaking styles on the spectral space. Two measurements are defined in order to represent the spectral space reduction and the spectral variance extension. Experiments are then carried on to investigate if indeed we find some differences between the three speaking styles using these measurements. We finally compare our results to those obtained by Nakamura on Japanese to see if the same phenomenon appears. We happen to find some cues, and it also seems that phone duration also plays an important role regarding spectral reduction, especially for spontaneous speech.