Abstract: A cloud or other network-based multimodal dialogue system is used to conduct automated screening interviews by engaging with conversational AI over a device of the user's choice (smartphone, tablet, laptop) from the comfort of their home. A screening interview will typically guide a user to blow towards a microphone, use signals from the microphone to calculate amplitudes, and use the amplitudes to calculate a flow rate and a flow volume. Contemplated systems and methods can be deployed in an automatically scalable cloud environment allowing it to serve an arbitrary number of end users at a very small cost per interaction. No special devices unique to the task are needed, which makes the technology accessible to a vast number of users.

Abstract: A computer-generated dialog session is customized for a user having a pathology characterized at least in part by a speech pathology. The user's speech is analyzed for spans of speech in which the starts and ends of the spans satisfy predetermined thresholds of time. Customization occurs by altering at least one of the following configurable parameters: (a) a threshold minimum signal strength of speech (dB) to consider as the start of the span of speech; (b) an adjustment factor by which signal strengths of background noise increases between consecutive spans of speech; (c) a threshold between signal strength during the span of speech and signal strength during the span of non-speech; (d) a start speech time threshold; and (e) an end speech time threshold.