Speech captured from an in-ear microphone (IEM) under an intra-aural device is beneficial in extremely noisy environments as it maintains a relatively high signal to noise ratio. Due to its limited bandwidth, speech enhancement is required in order to obtain a more natural speech. Consequently, quick and practical measurement of speech quality is important. In this paper, we compare the perform...

Feature space Maximum Likelihood Linear Regression (fMLLR) is a widely used technique for speaker adaptation in HMM-based speech recognition. However, in extremely resource constrained systems the time required to perform the sufficient statistics accumulation for fMLLR adaptation can be considerable. In this paper we describe a novel method that can lead to significant reduction in the time ta...

In this paper a tool for automatic segmentation and labeling of spontaneous speech is presented. It is developed and specially tuned for the European Portuguese (EP) language but simple changes are needed to convert it to other languages. The main purpose of this system is to quickly produce a high quality output of phonetic labels and related time boundaries using as input the speech signal on...

We present TclBLASR, a framework to integrate a proprietary speech recognition engine, an open source script language, such as Tcl/Tk and an open source sound analysis toolkit, such as Snack from KTH, into a user friendly platform that a user can write a Tcl/Tk script application quickly for speech recognition evaluation, speech data collection and automatic annotation, and speech technology de...

This paper describes the collect and transcription of a large set of Arabic broadcast news speech data. A total of more than 2000 hours of data was transcribed. The transcription factor for transcribing the broadcast news data has been reduced using a method such as Quick Rich Transcription (QRTR) as well as reducing the number of quality controls performed on the data. The data was collected f...

The subtle juncture cues in older varieties of English such as Received Pronunciation can be difficult for speakers of new English varieties to perceive. This study looks at the perception of word juncture characteristics in three varieties of English (British, Hong Kong and Singapore) amongst British, Hong Kong and Singaporean listeners in order to widen our understanding of English juncture c...

The Simple4All project enables the building of speech synthesis systems automatically from data with little or no expert supervision, thus creating speech synthesisers for new languages or domains in a quick, easy and pain-free way. Whilst substantial effort has been invested over the years into developing novel and progressively more natural sounding speech synthesis techniques, there has alwa...

This paper presents a speech processing platform which can be used to demonstrate and investigate speech enhancement methods. This platform is called Speech Enhancement for Android (SEA), and has been developed on the Android operating system, available to students, teaching staff and researchers through the Android market. SEA can be used as an additional teaching tool in undergraduate courses...

This paper describes the ITSVox speech-to-speech translation prototype currently under development at LATL in collaboration with IDIAP. The ITSVox project aims at a general, interactive, multimodal translation system with the following characterics : (i) it is not restricted to a particular subdomain, (ii) it can be used either as a fully automatic system or as an interactive system, (iii I it ...