Transcript 幻灯片 1

ANHUI USTC iFLYTEK CO., LTD
TEL: +86-551-5331800
FAX: +86-551-5331801
WEBSITE: http://www.iflytek.com
© 2002 iFLYTEK. All rights reserved.
This presentation is for informational purposes only. iFLYTEK MAKES
1 WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
NO
Network Speech Technology Industry in
China
--Qiang Bai
ANHUI USTC iFLYTEK Co., LTD.
安徽中科大讯飞信息科技有限公司
General introduction of the
speech industry
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General introduction of Chinese speech industry
• Chinese speech technology achieved great progress in the past
four years with the boom of Chinese economy. Chinese speech
technology gradually occupies the key position in the Pan-Asian
market by taking part into everyone’s everyday life.
• In consideration of the weak foundation and brief history,
Chinese speech technology market is still in a primary stage. The
total market is limited, and much work is needed to cultivate.
• Started in the mid 1980s, supported by the national government,
now driving by the iFLYTEK, the research of Chinese speech
synthesis technology has advanced rapidly. The synthesis effect
could satisfy most of the practical application.
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General introduction of Chinese speech industry
• The speech technology market of China is special. iFLYTEK
occupied a 82% market share, with the predominant market
position. Other suppliers are focusing on the lower-end market,
far behind iFLYTEK in both technology and market.
• Speech synthesis technology is the mainstream of market
appliance. Several industries includes the major customers. Call
centers o f telecommunication (value added services), financial
services almost form the 70% of the present total market.
• The potential market of speech technology is huge and
profitable.
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Present Situation of the
technology
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Challenges
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•
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•
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•
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Chinese is special and complex. The text analysis and rhythm analysis
of Chinese are hard to conduct.
There’s no blank between two Chinese characters, the word boundary is
hard to define.
One Chinese character might have different pronunciation in different
context, some pronunciation just exist in name.
Special signs should be translate according to the Chinese reading
habit. As a language with four tones, the rhythm feature of Chinese is
very complex, such as tone sandhi and r-colloring.
Mandarin is rhythm based, the mark up system is Pinyin but not
international phonetic alphabet.
During the construction of grammar rule and dictionary, a systematical
transcript framework is needed to mark the exceptive phenomenon. At
the same time, some sophisticate employees with the announcer
background is needed.
How to find out the best pair to concatenation in the huge corpus?
Based on the intelligent text analysis technology, how to predict the
most fluent speech parameter?
Those are all the challenges in Chinese speech synthesis.
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Innovation
• iFLYTEK has the intelligent text analysis technology, which
could solve the problems of word segmentation, polyphonic
characters, special signs and rhythm level questions.
• By using a huge speech database(3000sentences), together with
the human markups, the fluent sound could be generate through
the data driven, prosodic prediction and unit selection algorithm.
• With the latest hmm-based, and absolute data driven method, we
could generate the fluent voice with a small speech
database(500-1000) .
• We could simulate the target person’s pronunciation by the
MLLR based voice conversion method.
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Innovation
• iFLYTEK is the chair party for Chinese national government’s
speech technology standard working group.
• iFLYTEK has finished the Mandarin speech synthesis system
general technology specification. This specification has been
released as the national standard.
• This standard laid the ground work for Chinese speech
technology’s rapid growth
• the Mandarin speech synthesis system general technology
specification includes the CSSML mark up language, which
could satisfy the need for those exceptional characters’
synthesis.
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Innovation
• iFLYTEK is aspiring to take part in setting the international SSML
standard. That’s a great support to the Chinese language.
• Based on the CSSML’s result, iFLYTEK offers the international
SSML standard the suggestions of how to improve Chinese.
• Following are the latest updated terms for Chinese in the new
version of SSML1.1
– New sign is defined to support the work of specify the word
boundary.
– Extend the meaning of special phoneme sign to further support
Chinese Pinyin’s mark up.
– Offers a system to define the name. especially for the Chinese name
in which some characters would change their pronunciations.
– Offers the way to describe dialects.
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Keep step forward
With 20 years’ persistent efforts, the speech
technology has achieved great progress.
Year
1995
1998
2001
2004
Naturalness
<3.0
3.0
3.8
4.3
Naturalness is the key label of the synthesized speech. The
subjective scoring method is introduced to express the similarity
between the human voices and the synthesized voices.
MOS（Mean Opinion Score），5 is the best，1 is the worst.
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Obstructive factors in the
application of speech
technology
Obstructive factors
• Artificial services are still the mainstream for the cost
• China is rich in labor resources, artificial call centers are simple
and cheap. So a full-scale speech technology solution is far
ahead.
The average annual salary of the sophisticated call
center workers in Asia, (2006. $)
India
China
3,334
2,558
Malaysia
Philippines
Thailand
Singapore
5,442
3,348
3,656
13,677
Source:callcentres.net
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Obstructive factors
• Too many dialects increase the difficulty of the speech
technology’s popularization.
• Chinese is a multi- national country, with 56 nationalities in all.
Chinese language is complex, statistic shows there’re more than
3000 dialects in China. That’s a great challenge to the
development of Chinese speech technology.
– Based on the existing effect that speech technology could achieve,
the practical application effect could be improved through
customization. But the premise is a thoroughly understanding of the
customer’s need and purpose. iFLYTEK is leading in speech
technology market for we are experienced and we have the
professional solutions and the splendid team.
– iFLYTEK gained the national support for the project of set up the
Chinese dialects evaluation and recognition database in 2004.
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Obstructive factors
• Customer’s acceptance to the IT solution needs improvement
• Comparing to the developed country, the informatization
construction of China is weak and simple. Mostly because the
Chinese customers rely more on the hardware rather than the
software. Statistic shows that in the oversea countries the ratio
of hardware, software and service is 1:2:4, while in china the
ratio is less than 4:2:1.
– The differed acceptance to software and hardware influence the
living condition of Chinese software and service industry. There’s a
long time period to overpass until the living condition turns better
and everyone’s concept change.
• Customers’ habits need to be cultivate.
– Due to the development of Chinese informatization,
telecommunication comes to Chinese residents just a few years;
artificial services are the mainstream now. Self-service supported by
the speech technology is not so popular as the developed country.
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Obstructive factors
• The actualize capacity need progress
• System Integration corporations (SI) are the main body to develop
the application of speech technology in China. There’re more than
900 such companies in China without unit focus and steering. Thus
much energy are spending on the duplicative develop and illicit
competition. The whole industry is not canonical and ordered yet.
– Speech technology are gradually sophisticating, but SI companies still
stay at the preliminary stage. Some work like customer need’s
generation, product design, testing, customization, customer‘s
cultivation etc. are in projecting absence.
– As the leader of Chinese speech technology, iFLYTEK focused on the
basic theories’ research, practical application’s development,
customer’s cultivate, partner’s training, etc. Now she has been the
effective guarantee to the success of speech technology.
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Current Situation of commercial
application
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Driving force of speech technology’s application
• The top priority of northern American’s company is to satisfy the
customer’s need, to help the customer find the information and
service that they need as quick as possible. At the same time,
they try to improve the efficiency and reduce the labor cost.
45%
40%
Find the
information
44%
Reduce the
pressure
Cut the cost
36%
34%
35%
30%
25%
Improve
16%
loyalty
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
Empowers Decreases
callers to
calls
find
handled by
information live-agents
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Reduces
operating
costs
Increases
customer
retention
Source: Benchmark Portal, May 2005
Driving force of speech technology’s application
• The top priority of Chinese company is profit. They want to use
speech technology to offer more information and value added
services. So, in china, the big customers all belong to the
telecommunication industry.
Major Goals Customers Deploy Speech
Increase the income
To offer the information and
service
Increase competitive edge
Efficiency
Source: iFYTEK Survey
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Driving force of speech technology’s application
• The developing speech technology is driven by some actual
reasons. At the same time, we’ve found that Chinese customer’s
comment on the speech technology is different from the
sophisticated northern American market.
Improve Customer Service
Generate Revenue
Differentiate Products & Services
End User Productivity
Provide Personalized Services
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4.5
5
5.5
4
4.5
5
5.5
6
6.5
7
7.5
8
Improve Customer Service
End User Productivity
Differentiate Products and Services
Lower Overall Costs
Create New Products and Services
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6
6.5
7
7.5
8
Source: NUANCE V-World Survey
Present Chinese speech technology market
• In the major application industries like telecommunication,
financing, energy, transportation etc, iFLYTEK occupies a 82%
market share; representing the trend of the market.
• iFLYTEK has more than 800 partners in China. The total
application cases are more than 6000, each second, millions of
customers get their information and services through the
iFLYTEK speech technology.
• In China, there are many application cases in the value added
services. Speech recognition technology is now being applied in
the major industries like telecommunication, financing, energy,
transportation etc.
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Applications in all major industries
政府
银行
电信
体育
交通
证券
Chinese speech recognition applications
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National project
•
Key project—“Multi-language information service for
2008 Olympic Games”
•
iFLYTEK has been nominated as the only speech
technology provider, and been named as the “Best
participant” by the national 863 committee.
The major function of it is information searching through telephone.
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Thanks!
TEL: +86-551-5331800
FAX: +86-551-5331801
WEBSITE: http://www.iflytek.com
© 2002 iFLYTEK. All rights reserved.
This presentation is for informational purposes only. iFLYTEK MAKES
25WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
NO