Without the ability to interpret natural language, speech recognition is suited only for a subset of tasks (though certainly not trivial ones), such as data entry, simple commands or dictation. Similarly, without speech recognition natural language is restricted to the interpretation of written language, a stylized form of human communication. Spoken language systems thus represent an attempt t...

Today synthetic speech is often based on concatenation of natural speech, i.e. units such as diphones or polyphones are taken from natural speech and are then put together to form any word or sentence [5]. So far there have mainly been two ways of adding a visual modality to such a synthesis: Morphing between single images or concatenating video sequences. In this study, however, a new method i...

Speech based solutions have taken center stage with growth in the services industry where there is a need to cater to a very large number of people from all strata of the society. While natural language speech interfaces are the talk in the research community, yet in practice, menu based speech solutions thrive. Typically in a menu based speech solution the user is required to respond by speaki...

This special issue of the Journal is devoted to the work of twelve eminent speech scientists who apply novel soft computing methods to address some of the most difficult and persistent problems facing speech recognition systems today. I first heard these scientists discuss their innovative soft computing algorithms at the University of Salamanca where the Sixth International Conference on Soft ...

This study evaluated the use of imagined interactions in speech research, by comparing speech addressed to imaginary speech partners with natural speech addressed to genuine interaction partners. The shape of pitch contours derived from target words of samples of imaginary infant (IDS), foreigner (FDS) and British adult (ADS) directed speech produced by ten female students was compared to that ...

The research questions posed for this work were as follows: • Can speech recognition and techniques for topic spotting be used to identify spoken intent in unconstrained natural speech? • Can gesture recognition systems based on statistical speech recognition techniques be used to bridge the gap between physical movements and recognition of gestural intent? • How can speech and gesture be combi...

The ability of the auditory system to change the perceptual weighting of acoustic cues when faced with degraded speech has long been evidenced. However, the exact changes that occur remain mostly unknown. Here, we proposed to use the Auditory Classification Image (ACI) methodology to reveal the acoustic cues used in natural speech comprehension and in reduced (i.e. noise-vocoded or re-synthesiz...

We introduce the NU-MBROLA project as an extension of the MBROLA project for designing large NU-MBROLA databases exhibiting the same properties as MBROLA diphone databases, without the restriction of being composed of diphones. The accompanying NU-MBROLA synthesizer implements the MBROLA algorithm on speech segments only defined by their starting and ending points in natural speech files. It is...

In our previous work, we proposed a speaking-aid system converting electrolaryngeal speech (EL speech) to normal speech using a statistical voice conversion technique. The main weakness of our system is the difficulty of estimating natural contours of the fundamental frequency (F0) from EL speech including only built-in F0 contours. This paper proposes another speaking-aid system with an air-pr...

This paper provides a new method for automatically generating speech synthesis units. The algorithm, called Closed-Loop Training (CLT), is based on evaluating and reducing the distortion in synthesized speech. It minimizes distortion caused by synthesis process such as prosodic modification in an analytic way. The distortion is measured by calculating the error between synthesized speech units ...