Speech And Computer

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Speech and Computer, SPECOM 2021, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in September 2021.* The 74 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 163 submissions. The papers present current research in the area of computer speech processing including audio signal processing, automatic speech recognition, speaker recognition, computational paralinguistics, speech synthesis, sign language and multimodal processing, and speech and language resources. *Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, SPECOM 2021 was held as a hybrid event.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Speech and Computer, SPECOM 2019, held in Istanbul, Turkey, in August 2019. The 57 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 86 submissions. The papers present current research in the area of computer speech processing including audio signal processing, automatic speech recognition, speaker recognition, computational paralinguistics, speech synthesis, sign language and multimodal processing, and speech and language resources.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Speech and Computer, SPECOM 2020, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in October 2020. The 65 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 160 submissions. The papers present current research in the area of computer speech processing including speech science, speech technology, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, language identification, multimedia processing, human-machine interaction, deep learning for audio processing, computational paralinguistics, affective computing, speech and language resources, speech translation systems, text mining and sentiment analysis, voice assistants, etc. Due to the Corona pandemic SPECOM 2020 was held as a virtual event.

New material treats such contemporary subjects as automatic speech recognition and speaker verification for banking by computer and privileged (medical, military, diplomatic) information and control access. The book also focuses on speech and audio compression for mobile communication and the Internet. The importance of subjective quality criteria is stressed. The book also contains introductions to human monaural and binaural hearing, and the basic concepts of signal analysis. Beyond speech processing, this revised and extended new edition of Computer Speech gives an overview of natural language technology and presents the nuts and bolts of state-of-the-art speech dialogue systems.

An examination of more than sixty years of successes and failures in developing technologies that allow computers to understand human spoken language. Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey famously featured HAL, a computer with the ability to hold lengthy conversations with his fellow space travelers. More than forty years later, we have advanced computer technology that Kubrick never imagined, but we do not have computers that talk and understand speech as HAL did. Is it a failure of our technology that we have not gotten much further than an automated voice that tells us to "say or press 1"? Or is there something fundamental in human language and speech that we do not yet understand deeply enough to be able to replicate in a computer? In The Voice in the Machine, Roberto Pieraccini examines six decades of work in science and technology to develop computers that can interact with humans using speech and the industry that has arisen around the quest for these technologies. He shows that although the computers today that understand speech may not have HAL's capacity for conversation, they have capabilities that make them usable in many applications today and are on a fast track of improvement and innovation. Pieraccini describes the evolution of speech recognition and speech understanding processes from waveform methods to artificial intelligence approaches to statistical learning and modeling of human speech based on a rigorous mathematical model--specifically, Hidden Markov Models (HMM). He details the development of dialog systems, the ability to produce speech, and the process of bringing talking machines to the market. Finally, he asks a question that only the future can answer: will we end up with HAL-like computers or something completely unexpected?

This new book is the first to provide a truly understandable, non-technical overview of all the major areas in the computer processing of human speech -- speech recognition, speech synthesis, speaker recognition, language identification, lip synchronization, and co-channel separation. It takes a unique, nonmathematical approach in exploring the nature of human language and its impact on the science and methodologies of computer voice technology. In one, easy-to-read source, you gain a deeper understanding of the fundamentals, uses, and applications of the technology itself and of the strengths and weaknesses of various systems. A time-saving glossary of technical terms is included.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Speech and Computer, SPECOM 2014, held in Novi Sad, Serbia. The 56 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 100 initial submissions. It is a conference with long tradition that attracts researchers in the area of computer speech processing (recognition, synthesis, understanding etc.) and related domains (including signal processing, language and text processing, multi-modal speech processing or human-computer interaction for instance).

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Speech and Computer, SPECOM 2015, held in Athens, Greece, in September 2015. The 59 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 104 initial submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics in the area of computer speech processing such as recognition, synthesis, and understanding and related domains including signal processing, language and text processing, multi-modal speech processing or human-computer interaction.