Speech:Home


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=Welcome to the Speech Project Pages= Here you'll find information about the UNH Manchester Speech Project, and undergraduate research projected hosted by both the spring Capstone course (COMP 790) and via independent study over the summer by the Summer Speech Academy.

History of Speech Recognition
"In other early recognition systems of the 1950’s, Olson and Belar of RCA Laboratories built a system to recognize 10 syllables of a single talker and at MIT Lincoln Lab, Forgie and Forgie built a speaker-independent 10-vowel recognizer. In the 1960’s, several Japanese laboratories demonstrated their capability of building special purpose hardware to perform a speech recognition task. Most notable were the vowel recognizer of Suzuki and Nakata at the Radio Research Lab in Tokyo, the phoneme recognizer of Sakai and Doshita at Kyoto University, and the digit recognizer of NEC Laboratories. The work of Sakai and Doshita involved the first use of a speech segmenter for analysis and recognition of speech in different portions of the input utterance. In contrast, an isolated digit recognizer implicitly assumed that the unknown utterance contained a complete digit (and no other speech sounds or words) and thus did not need an explicit “segmenter.” Kyoto University’s work could be considered a precursor to a continuous speech recognition system.

In another early recognition system Fry and Denes, at University College in England, built a phoneme recognizer to recognize 4 vowels and 9 consonants. By incorporating statistical information about allowable phoneme sequences in English, they increased the overall phoneme recognition accuracy for words consisting of two or more phonemes. This work marked the first use of statistical syntax (at the phoneme level) in automatic speech recognition." Automatic Speech Recognition – A Brief History of the Technology Development, B.H. Juang & Lawrence R. Rabiner

In 1962 IBM at the World’s Fair in Seattle, displayed a device they built called the “Shoebox” boasting the capability to recognize 16 spoken words including 0-9 “plus”, “minus” and “total” It also had the ability to communicate with an adding machine that could process and print simple addition and subtraction problems.

The Hidden Markov Modeling (HMM) approach to speech recognition was invented by Lenny Baum of Princeton University and shared with ARPA contractors including IBM. HMM is a complex mathematical pattern-matching strategy that eventually was adopted by many of the leading speech recognition companies including Dragon Systems, IBM, and AT&T.

Challenge
The challenge that speech recognition presents is deceptively complex. How hard could it be right? I understand people even if they have heavy accents and the words are not necessarily in the right order. We as humans take for granted our innate ability to communicate developed over millions of years. Computers on the other hand are literal machines, generally to a machine things are on or off. Speech recognition doesn't listen for words it breaks them up into smaller parts called phones. The reality is that it is not so cut and dry. Depending on the word, its context and/or the speaker himself the meaning of a phone and the very sound itself can have a drastically different value.