Several recent studies have shown that speech production develops in an organized way, already in the first twelve months of life. This development is determined by several factors such as anatomical growth and physiological constraints. Studying the sound production of deaf infants and comparing this with that of normally hearing infants, can give more insight into the role of auditory speech ...

This paper reports on the development of Chatako-AID, a communication aid for non-vocal people using corpus-based cocatenative speech synthesis by creating a speech corpus especially designed for such use. The concept of Chatako-AID; synthesis with the user’s voice, which makes use of precomposed texts, is highly appreciated by the target user. This confirms that the recording of a minimum set ...

In this paper we investigate the rapid deployment of a twoway Afrikaans to English Speech-to-Speech Translation system. We discuss the approaches and amount of work involved to port a system to a new language pair, i.e. the steps required to rapidly adapt ASR, MT and TTS component to Afrikaans under limited time and data constraints. The resulting system represents the first prototype built for...

Speech animation synthesis is still a challenging topic in the field of computer graphics. Despite many challenges, representing detailed appearance of inner mouth such as nipping tongue’s tip with teeth and tongue’s back hasn’t been achieved in the resulting animation. To solve this problem, we propose a method of data-driven speech animation synthesis especially when focusing on the inside of...

Robot utterances generally sound monotonous, unnatural, and unfriendly because their Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems are not optimized for communication but for text-reading. Here we present a nonmonologue speech synthesis for robots. The key novelty lies in speech synthesis based on Hidden Markov models (HMMs) using a non-monologue corpus: we collected a speech corpus in a nonmonologue style in w...

The critical issues involved in speech-to-speech translation are obtaining proper source segments and synthesizing accurate target speech. Therefore, this article develops a novel multiple-translation spotting method to deal with these issues efficiently. Term multiple-translation spotting refers to the task of extracting target-language synthesis patterns that correspond to a given set of sour...

Simultaneous speech translation is a technology that attempts to reduce the delay inherent in speech translation by beginning translation before the end of explicit sentence boundaries. Despite best efforts, there is still often a trade-off between speed and accuracy in these systems, with systems with less delay also achieving lower accuracy. However, somewhat surprisingly, there is no previou...

One of the most important social problems that many of the developed countries face is the constant rise of the percentage of the elderly population values. A major health issue affecting this part of the population is the appearance of dementia of the Alzheimers type (AD) which is the most common case of dementia, affecting around 50 million people worldwide. In addition, the frequency of the ...

This paper presents the validation of the expressive content of an acted oral corpus produced to be used in speech synthesis. Firstly, objective validation has been conducted by means of automatic emotion identification techniques using statistical features obtained from the prosodic parameters of speech. Secondly, a listening test has been performed with a subset of utterances. The relationshi...

This paper deals with speech communication aspects with an accent on speech dialogues, in which one communication partner is a computer. After some basic definitions, we discuss the speech components of a man-machine dialogue, namely speech recognition and speech synthesis. It will be shown that a computer is far away from human’s ability to recognise or understand speech.