Applied Speech Information Systems

2/008 NRDP Project

Project coordinator:

Prof. Géza Gordos ([email protected])

Members of the consortium:

• Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Department of Telecommunications and Telematics (BUTE) • Pázmány P. Catholic University (PPCU) • Westel Mobile Telecommunications Company (WMT) • AITIA Inc. (AITIA) • MorphoLogic Ltd. (ML) 4/25/2020 Applied Speech Information Systems (Contact: [email protected]) 1/14

General objectives

• Integration of generic infocommunication technologies • Extension of complementary knowledge bases – 2 university research labs – 2 ICT SME companies – 1 telecommunication corporation • Instead of expensive and often poor quality adaptation of technologies developed for the English language, the characteristics of the Hungarian language are taken into account • Strengthening international competitive position • Assistance in integration of handicapped people 4/25/2020 Applied Speech Information Systems (Contact: [email protected]) 2/14

Technical objectives

•

The innovative goal of the project:

 research, development and demonstration of generic technologies integrated into practical services •

New generic technologies:

 speaker independent, open dictionary Hungarian speech recognizer for telephone channel, based on speech databases and speech analysis (text based dictionary generation)  speech synthesizer with variable size acoustic database units and general Hungarian name and address reader  intelligent dialogue system description and management framework system applying speech interfaces  integrating the above technologies for intelligent telecommunication information retrieval systems 4/25/2020 Applied Speech Information Systems (Contact: [email protected]) 3/14

Technical objectives and results

Speech recognition (BUTE – AITIA)

• Goal: Development of multi-channel speaker independent speech recognition engine for telephone services

Completed subtasks

– speech database generation (600 speakers x 5 minutes, noisy) – development of an automatic segmentation method – optimization of the reliability and resource requirements of the recognition algorithm (PC: 20 channels, DSP: 180 channels front-end) – training of phone models (monophone, diphone, triphone) – automatic phonetic transcription for dictionary generation 4/25/2020 Applied Speech Information Systems (Contact: [email protected]) 4/14

Technical objectives and results

Speech synthesis (BUTE)

• Goal: Development of – improved high quality text-to-speech framework – generic name and address reader for Hungarian – application(s) to special database access

Completed subtasks

– processing of 3+2 million name and address records • manual classification of 300.000 records – automatic classifier of Hungarian proper/company names and addresses – new name and address reading dialogue strategies – detailed reading (syllabification and spelling) algorithms – new TTS + name and address reading system 4/25/2020 Applied Speech Information Systems (Contact: [email protected]) 5/14

Technical objectives and results

Dialogue system (AITIA)

• Goal: Development of an intelligent framework and dialogue system for speech recognition based call center and voice portal applications

Completed subtasks:

– speech recognition based dialogue management system – development of the dialogue description structure – implementation of the dialogue editor – implementation of the dialogue manager 4/25/2020 Applied Speech Information Systems (Contact: [email protected]) 6/14

Research Objectives and Results

Individual voice features (PPCU)

• Goal: Analysis and modification of individual speech feature characteristics

Completed subtasks

– analysis of speaker voice timbre and features – transplantation of source speaker's features into target speaker's voice 4/25/2020 Applied Speech Information Systems (Contact: [email protected]) 7/14

Research Objectives and Results

Language model (ML)

• Goal: Study and report on integration of linguistic language models into speech controlled applications

Completed subtasks

– analysis of application of possibilities for feedback of linguistic analysis in speech recognition – analysis of possibilities of linguistic support for increasing the recognition rate of the most probable character string 4/25/2020 Applied Speech Information Systems (Contact: [email protected]) 8/14

Results of integration Voxenter

TM

voice portal

• Voxenter is connecting to and extending the functionality of any PBX or call center • Flexible agent-based real-time information service management and database connectivity • Unique and standards-based dialogue editor supporting XML and VXML • Web/Java based remote administration console • It can be connected to analogue, ISDN (BRI, PRI), and VoIP telephone interfaces • AITIA Inc. and DTT-BUTE use the system since December 2002 (call +36 1 382-7580) • IT 2003 Hungary conference and exhibition award 4/25/2020 Applied Speech Information Systems (Contact: [email protected]) 9/14

speech databases

Voice portal development

training phone models language models synthesis units synthesis rules speech recognition engine speech synthesizer dialogue system telephone interface speech characteristics analysis and modification at development: 4/25/2020 dialogue editor operator framework system dialogue manager dialogue description Applied Speech Information Systems (Contact: [email protected]) database 10/14

Results of integration Speech enabled call center

Integration of speech recognition and speech synthesis systems with AVAYA technology and development of demo applications for Westel Inc.

– Billing information service (integrating speech recognition and number and date reader) – Telephone number based reverse directory assistance (integrating name and address reader) 4/25/2020 Applied Speech Information Systems (Contact: [email protected]) 11/14

Avaya call center integration

phone models language models NLSR protocol interface speech recognition engine AVAYA call center 4/25/2020 Proxy TTS protocol interface ProfiVox speech synthesizer synthesis units synthesis rules Applied Speech Information Systems (Contact: [email protected]) 12/14

Project exploitation

Research, education

– new scientific results, strengthening of graduate and PhD schools – growing international collaboration potential – feedback into the education

Industry

– opening new market possibilities – integrating new languages (

industrial demand for other central-european languages TTS, ASR

) – further products and integrations (

100 free ProfiVox TTS licences for blind people, Digitania, T-Systems RIC, ...

) 4/25/2020 Applied Speech Information Systems (Contact: [email protected]) 13/14

Thanks for your attention!

4/25/2020 Applied Speech Information Systems (Contact: [email protected]) 14/14