Two new projects focus on speech technology

MediaLT is launching two new pilot projects: Child's Voice (Barnestemme) and Sound Control (Lydstyring). As the names imply, the projects will look at opportunities for developing a Norwegian synthetic child's voice, and control of the PC using spoken sound!

Story by: - 16.02.2010

MediaLT has worked for the development and promotion of Norwegian speech technology through the NFR (Norwegian Research Council) projects Speech based human computer interaction (STEMINT, Project. 176984/i40) and Voice control in Multimodal dialouge (SMUDI, Project. 183215/S10). MediaLT has also established a commercially directed Scandinavian commitment through the Swedish / Norwegian cooperation project VOMOTE (project nr. 145,589), supported by Innovation Norway and Tillvekstvärket. In the VOMOTE project, a command-based voice recognition PC control system has been developed. Now we want to investigate how the knowledge gained from these projects may be utilized for new user groups.

Without words

The sound control project is aimed at people who have difficulties using the PC, but for whom a traditional word-based voice recognition system falls short, for example because they cannot pronounce words clearly or systematically enough for a voice controlled system to understand them. The project will thus consider the possibility of producing a sound-based voice management system for PCs.

A voice for voiceless children

In the Child's Voice project, we will investigate what is needed to create a Norwegian synthetic child's voice. One application of synthetic speech is as a way of talking for persons with impaired speech abilities. However, the development of children's voices has lacked focus, both nationally and internationally. The reason for this is probably that producing a child's voice is a lot more complicated than producing an adult's voice.

These are two exciting speech technology projects, and you can read about them on their project pages: Sound Control and Child's Voice!

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