February 1, 2008 – 1:50 am
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Have been doing a lot a lot of readings and research in the past few weeks. Going to show off a little on what I’ve learnt =P
Voice Recognition Technology
Most of the existing voice recognition technologies require speaker to “train” the system before it can be used. For example, the voice tags feature on our handphones requires us to record our voice before we can use the voice command. The problem with this technology is that it’s speaker dependent. Once the voice recognition system is trained, it’s only catered for that specific speaker, no one else.
Now, a lot of research is ongoing to develop a robust speaker independent system. Anyone can use it, and it doesn’t need to be trained. One of the methods being researched is phoneme recognition. Phoneme is the smallest unit of sound. For example, the word “ship” - it has two phonemes, “sh” and “p”. A phoneme is pronounced without using voice. Try putting your fingers on your throat and pronounce “sh”, then try pronouncing “ship”, feel the difference? When pronouncing a phoneme, there should not be any vibration at the throat region.
Since phonemes are pronounced without voice, most of them are speaker independent. There may still be some variations in pronouncing phonemes between speakers from different parts of the world, but generally, they are the same. So, by recognising phonemes, the system can be speaker independent.
However, researches are not just performing phoneme recognition, they are also trying multi-phonemes recognition. Reason is because the pronounciation of “ph” and “f” are almost the same, so in order to differentiate between the two, the system strings up a few phonemes and make the most sensible word out of it. So you’ll get “funny” instead of “phunny”.
The problem with speaker independent voice recognition system is that it requires high processing power. This translates into high cost and therefore not really cost efficient to implement it in consumer products yet. However, as the technologies continue to evolve, it will not be long before we start telling our laptop to switch on itself =)
I did not anticipate to write so much for just one sharing topic. Ok, shall leave the other topics for subsequent posts.
Sidenote: Something came upon me recently… and I am starting to feel “dumb” again… =) It’s been a long time since the clumsiness visited me hahaha
Posted in Just some craps | 5 Comments »
