Researchers claim their AI can hear if a speaker is wearing a mask

Researchers at Duke Kunshan University, Wuhan University, Lenovo, and Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou claim to have developed an AI system that detects whether a person is wearing a mask from the sound of their muffled speech. They say that in experiments, it achieves 78.8% accuracy on one metric, demonstrating that sound could be a useful means of enforcing mask-wearing during the pandemic. The team's work is a submission to the 11th annual Computational Paralinguistics Challenge (ComParE) at the upcoming Interspeech 2020 conference, an open challenge dealing with the states and traits of speakers as manifested in their speech. This year saw the introduction of a "mask sub-challenge" in which the goal is to develop algorithms capable of determining whether a person is wearing a mask from the sound of their voice. For the sub-challenge, every competitor -- the coauthors of this study included -- must use the same corpus of 32 German speakers recorded for 10 hours in an audio studio wearing Lohmann & Rauscher face coverings.