My Voice Library: Protocol for Developing Audio and Visual Datasets to Enable Personalized Real-Time Communication...

Communication is a human right; despite this, children with cerebral palsy and dysarthria experience constraints due to their physical disability, affecting their opportunity to reach their full potential and ability to fully participate in play, school, and socializing. For many, their challenge to produce clear speech that can be understood is interpreted by others as an intellectual impairment. Children with moderate-severe speech impairments such as dysarthria often rely on technology solutions, which can translate text or symbols to speech manually or using a single binary switch, scanning hierarchical switch‑access menus. This is time-consuming, arduous, and 15 to 20 times slower than normal speech. Technology innovations, developed via high-quality datasets of audio-video samples of dysarthric speech, hold the key to build personalized speech-recognition algorithms that allow us to bridge this gap.

My Voice Library is a repository of high-quality audio and visual datasets of children living in Australia with cerebral palsy who have dysarthria. The children are presented with gamified modules based on words and sentences from the Frenchay Dysarthria Assessment 2 to allow speech and language therapists, engineers. and programmers to develop personalized speech-recognition approaches to enable personalized real-time communication.

Our ethics and consenting process enables participants (8-18 y) to choose if they want their information to be used for personalized research in addition to general research. The study has been approved by the University of Sydney's Human Research Ethics Committee (2023/263). Caregivers of the participants provide written informed consent. The results will be disseminated through contributions to international conferences and scientific journals, and they will also be included in students' theses.

The National Health and Medical Research Council funded the study in April 2021. Data collection commenced in March 2024 and will continue until 99 participants have been recruited, after which the database will remain active. As of April 2026, thirteen of 99 participants have been recruited. Preliminary data analysis commenced in 2026. The results from the preliminary analysis are expected to be published in 2027, with full results to be published once 99 participants have been successfully recruited.

My Voice Library embeds high-quality voice and video data assessments through gamified modules based on the Frenchay Dysarthria Assessment 2 and was designed in partnership with an active patient and a public involvement advisory group. My Voice Library and its associated information governance will facilitate the research use of real-world data where ethical approval and consent are given. My Voice Library enables the collection of voice data in controlled yet naturalistic environments for children, enhancing the clinical relevance and quality of the dataset. The modular and gamified design promotes sustained participant engagement, reduces fatigue, and increases the quantity and diversity of data collected.