Author: Nhan Phan

I was very pleased to attend Interspeech again this year in Kos, Greece.  Kos is a really comfy island located on the east coast of the Aegean sea, almost touching the mainland of Turkey. The conference was held between 01,09 to 05,09, due to this reason the weather is neither too hot nor too cold. Still at noon, it could be warmer if exposed long under the sun but the afternoon breeze can ease the heat. 

The main conference takes place at Hippocrates hotel with the name after the famous Greek physician and philosopher. In one of the rooms, I presented my work entitled “A Framework for Phoneme-Level Pronunciation Assessment Using CTC”.  Thanks to the practice of the presentation with my professor Prof. Salvi and Prof. Svendsen before coming here, I was not nervous at all. I got a lot of valuable feedback and comments during the 5 mins’ Q&A and after the entire session.  

Because my presentation was on Monday morning, I was able to concentrate on other people’s work for the rest of the time. I got inspired a lot from all those great minds and prepared myself a list of literature to read after the conference, really helpful and encouraging! In addition to my two professors at NTNU, I also met Prof. Kurimo and his group from Aalto university.  We all noticed that our TEFLON project and our research field, i.e., the concern on child speech, is attracting more and more attention this year. That also strengthened our determination to continuously devote yourself on this topic.

During one of the evenings when I took a walk in the Kos town, I really fall in love to this place:  Kind people, delicious seafood, scenic views, historical buildings and stories etc. 

Xinwei Cao

10.09.2024

Hi, I’m Nhan Phan, a PhD student at Aalto University. I’m part of the Teflon project, and my role is to maintain the Pop2Talk Nordic mobile application. Pop2Talk is a language learning game that allows children to imitate words that were said during the game progress, and get a rating of their pronunciation. Based on the original game version intended for English, the Pop2Talk Nordic version expanded to Nordic languages. As I write this blog post, we have successfully developed four different versions of the game. These include:

• A Finnish version for children who find it challenging to pronounce the phoneme “R”.
• A Swedish version for children with Speech Sound Disorder.
• And two other versions for children who want to learn Norwegian or English.

While much of the project’s foundational work was led by experienced partners in children’s speech-language pathology and in automatic speech recognition technology, I was fortunate to be involved in the project, being responsible for the design and maintenance of both the server and the mobile game.

With our need for illustrations in multiple languages, we turned to the latest AI technology for automatic image generation. I provided our partners with technical instructions on crafting text prompts to ensure the resulting images were both captivating and child-friendly. To my surprise, the images they produced were outstanding, surpassing all my expectations. Check out this cool picture from Magdalena at Karolinska Institutet. Funny thing, the girl is the spitting image of my 2-year-old daughter. I had to ask right away to use it as my daughter’s avatar.

When I showed the game to my daughter, she was super into it—even though she’s just starting to learn Finnish. She got so hooked that I had to yank the phone from her! I really hope other kids get just as excited when they play (and fingers crossed, they’ll want to take a break after a while).

As we move into October, we’re preparing for numerous experiments. These will study how children acquire vocabulary and pronunciation, and evaluate the game’s effectiveness in helping them. Those experiments will be conducted in various schools across Finland, Sweden and Norway. My primary focus at the moment is to ensure the server runs without any serious problems.