Towards the Objective Speech Assessment of Smoking Status based on Voice Features: A Review of the Literature

In smoking cessation clinical research and practice, objective validation of self-reported smoking status is crucial for ensuring the reliability of the primary outcome, that is, smoking abstinence. Speech signals convey important information about a speaker, such as age, gender, body size, emotional state, and health state. We investigated (1) if smoking could measurably alter voice features, (2) if smoking cessation could lead to changes in voice, and therefore (3) if the voice-based smoking status assessment has the potential to be used as an objective smoking cessation validation method.