Subject: comp.speech Frequently Asked Questions - part 3/3 Newsgroups: comp.speech,comp.answers,news.answers From: andrewh@speech.su.oz.au (Andrew Hunt) Date: 15 May 1994 12:41:50 GMT Archive-name: comp-speech-faq/part3 Last-modified: 1994/04/06 SECTION 5 - Speech Synthesis Q5.1: What is speech synthesis? Speech synthesis is the task of transforming written input to spoken output. The input can either be provided in a graphemic/orthographic or a phonemic script, depending on its source. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Q5.2: How can speech synthesis be performed? There are several algorithms. The choice depends on the task they're used for. The easiest way is to just record the voice of a person speaking the desired phrases. This is useful if only a restricted volume of phrases and sentences is used, e.g. messages in a train station, or schedule information via phone. The quality depends on the way recording is done. More sophisticated but worse in quality are algorithms which split the speech into smaller pieces. The smaller those units are, the less are they in number, but the quality also decreases. An often used unit is the phoneme, the smallest linguistic unit. Depending on the language used there are about 35-50 phonemes in western European languages, i.e. there are 35-50 single recordings. The problem is combining them as fluent speech requires fluent transitions between the elements. The intellegibility is therefore lower, but the memory required is small. A solution to this dilemma is using diphones. Instead of splitting at the transitions, the cut is done at the center of the phonemes, leaving the transitions themselves intact. This gives about 400 elements (20*20) and the quality increases. The longer the units become, the more elements are there, but the quality increases along with the memory required. Other units which are widely used are half-syllables, syllables, words, or combinations of them, e.g. word stems and inflectional endings. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Q5.3: What are some good references/books on synthesis? The following are good introductory books/articles. Douglas O'Shaughnessy -- Speech Communication: Human and Machine Addison Wesley series in Electrical Engineering: Digital Signal Processing, 1987. D. H. Klatt, "Review of Text-To-Speech Conversion for English", Jnl. of the Acoustic Society of America (JASA), v82, Sept. 1987, pp 737-793. I. H. Witten. Principles of Computer Speech. (London: Academic Press, Inc., 1982). John Allen, Sharon Hunnicut and Dennis H. Klatt, "From Text to Speech: The MITalk System", Cambridge University Press, 1987. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Q5.4: What software/hardware is available? In the last year there has been a great increase in the release of speech synthesis software - both commercial and public domain. The following is a list of as many products/packages as I can find out about. Any help in keeping this list up-to-date will be appreciated. Package: ORATOR Text-to-Speech Synthesizer Platform: SUN SPARC, Decstation 5000. Portable to other UNIX platforms. Description: Sophisticated speech synthesis package. Has text preprocessing (for abbreviations, numbers), acronym citation rules, and human-like spelling routines. High accuracy for pronunciation of names of people, places and businesses in America, text-to-speech translation for common words; rules for stress and intonation marking, based on natural-sounding demisyllable synthesis; various methods of user control and customization at most stages of processing. Currently, ORATOR is most appropriate for applications containing a large component of names in the text, and requires some amount of user- specified text-preprocessing to produce good quality speech for general text. Hardware: Standard audio output of SPARC, or Decstation audio hardware. At least 16M of memory recommended. Cost: Binary License: $5,000. Source license for porting or commercial use: $30,000. Availability: Contact Bellcore's Licensing Office (1-800-527-1080) or email: jzilg@cc.bellcore.com (John Zilg) Package: Text to phoneme program (1) Platform: unknown Description: Text to phoneme program. Based on Naval Research Lab's set of text to phoneme rules. Availability: By FTP from "shark.cse.fau.edu" (131.91.80.13) in the directory /pub/src/phon.tar.Z Package: Text to phoneme program (2) Platform: unknown Description: Text to phoneme program. Availability: By FTP from "wuarchive.wustl.edu" in the file /mirrors/unix-c/utils/phoneme.c Package: Text to phoneme program (3) Description: A public domain version of the same Naval Research Lab text to phoneme rules. Availability: By anonymous ftp from svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk:comp.speech/sources/english2phoneme.shar Package: Text to speech program Description: A implementation of the Klatt phoneme to waveform speech synthesiser. Availability: By anonymous ftp from svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk:comp.speech/sources/klatt-0.02.tar.Z Package: "Speak" - a Text to Speech Program Platform: Sun SPARC Description: Text to speech program based on concatenation of pre-recorded speech segments. A function library can be used to integrate speech output into other code. Hardware: SPARC audio I/O Availability: by FTP from "wilma.cs.brown.edu" as /pub/speak.tar.Z Package: TheBigMouth - a Text to Speech Program Platform: NeXT Description: Text to speech program based on concatenation of pre-recorded speech segments. NeXT equivalent of "Speak" for Suns. Availability: try NeXT archive sites such as sonata.cc.purdue.edu. Package: TextToSpeech Kit Platform: NeXT Computers Description: The TextToSpeech Kit does unrestricted conversion of English text to synthesized speech in real-time. The user has control over speaking rate, median pitch, stereo balance, volume, and intonation type. Text of any length can be spoken, and messages can be queued up, from multiple applications if desired. Real-time controls such as pause, continue, and erase are included. Pronunciations are derived primarily by dictionary look-up. The Main Dictionary has nearly 100,000 hand-edited pronunciations which can be supplemented or overridden with the User and Application dictionaries. A number parser handles numbers in any form. A letter-to-sound knowledge base provides pronunciations for words not in the Main or customized dictionaries. Dictionary search order is under user control. Special modes of text input are available for spelling and emphasis of words or phrases. The actual conversion of text to speech is done by the TextToSpeech Server. The Server runs as an independent task in the background, and can handle up to 50 client connections. Misc: The TextToSpeech Kit comes in two packages: the Developer Kit and the User Kit. The Developer Kit enables developers to build and test applications which incorporate text-to-speech. It includes the TextToSpeech Server, the TextToSpeech Object, the pronunciation editor PrEditor, several example applications, phonetic fonts, example source code, and developer documentation. The User Kit provides support for applications which incorporate text-to-speech. It is a subset of the Developer Kit. Hardware: Uses standard NeXT Computer hardware. Cost: TextToSpeech User Kit: $175 CDN ($145 US) TextToSpeech Developer Kit: $350 CDN ($290 US) Upgrade from User to Developer Kit: $175 CDN ($145 US) Availability: Trillium Sound Research 1500, 112 - 4th Ave. S.W., Calgary, Alberta, Canada, T2P 0H3 Tel: (403) 284-9278 Fax: (403) 282-6778 Order Desk: 1-800-L-ORATOR (US and Canada only) Email: TTSInfo@trillium.ab.ca Package: SGI Developers Toolbox Synthesiser Platform: SGI Description: The SGI Developer Toolbox 4.0 CDROM contains a basic public domain text-to-speech program in the publics/speak directory. The directory includes man pages and source. Availability: on the SGI Developer Toolbox 4.0 CDROM Package: rsynth Platform: Various (including Sun, Linux, NeXT, SGI) Description: Text-to-speech converter produced by combination of various public-domain pieces. Price: Free Availability: by anonymous ftp from svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk:/comp.speech/sources/rsynth-1.0.tar.Z svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk:/comp.speech/sources/rsynth-1.0.tar.gz Package: SENSYN speech synthesizer Platform: PC, Mac, Sun, and NeXt Rough Cost: $300 Description: This formant synthesizer produces speech waveform files based on the (Klatt) KLSYN88 synthesizer. It is intended for laboratory and research use. Note that this is NOT a text-to-speech synthesizer, but creates speech sounds based upon a large number of input variables (formant frequencies, bandwidths, glottal pulse characteristics, etc.) and would be used as part of a TTS system. Includes full source code. Availability: Sensimetrics Corporation, 64 Sidney Street, Cambridge MA 02139. Fax: (617) 225-0470; Tel: (617) 225-2442. Email: sensimetrics@sens.com Package: SPCHSYN.EXE Platform: PC? Availability: By anonymous ftp from evans.ee.adfa.oz.au (131.236.30.24) in /mirrors/tibbs/Applications/SPCHSYN.EXE It is a self extracting DOS archive. Requirements: May require special TI product(s), but all source is there. Package: CSRE: Canadian Speech Research Environment Platform: PC Cost: Distributed on a cost recovery basis Description: CSRE is a software system which includes in addition to the Klatt speech synthesizer, SPEECH ANALYSIS and EXPERIMENT CONTROL SYSTEM. A paper about the whole package can be found in: Jamieson D.G. et al, "CSRE: A Speech Research Environment", Proc. of the Second Intl. Conf. on Spoken Language Processing, Edmonton: University of Alberta, pp. 1127-1130. Hardware: Can use a range of data aqcuisition/DSP Availability: For more information about the availability of this software contact Krystyna Marciniak - email march@uwovax.uwo.ca Tel (519) 661-3901 Fax (519) 661-3805. For technical information email ramji@uwovax.uwo.ca Note: A more detailed description is given in Q1.8 on speech environments. Package: Eloquence (currently an alpha release) Platform: Windows and Solaris Description: Software based text-to-speech package. Generates waveforms completely algorithmically instead of by concatenating waveforms, for maximum flexibility and naturalism. For instance, when the user requests a deeper voice, the software simulates a larger vocal tract, instead of simply pitch-shifting samples. Uses high-level linguistic parsing, which obviates the need for a huge dictionary. Handles numbers, acronyms, currency, etc. Includes a set of annotation symbols, for placing stress on particular words, expressing excitement/boredom, etc. Also allows phonetic input. The final version, including support for Windows DDE and OLE and UNIX Sockets, will be released by the end of 1994. Produces male and female voices for General American English. Dialects under development include Alabama, Brooklyn, and Boston. Price: $5000 (unconfirmed) Availability: Eloquent Technology, Inc. 24 Highgate Circle Ithaca, NY 14850 Ph: (607) 257-6829 Fax: (607) 272-0058 Package: JSRU Platform: UNIX and PC Cost: 100 pounds sterling (from academic institutions and industry) Description: A C version of the JSRU system, Version 2.3 is available. It's written in Turbo C but runs on most Unix systems with very little modification. A Form of Agreement must be signed to say that the software is required for research and development only. Contact: Dr. E.Lewis (eric.lewis@uk.ac.bristol) Package: Klatt-style synthesiser Platform: Unix Cost: Free Description: Software posted to comp.speech in late 1992. Availability: By anonymous ftp from the comp.speech archives as svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk:/comp.speech/sources/klatt-0.02.tar.Z Package: Speech Manager and PlainTalk Platform: Macintosh Cost: Free Description: Apple's new text-to-speech system extension(s) that enable applications (listed below) to perform text-to-speech conversion. The Speech Manager runs on most Macs, but PlainTalk (and the high quality voices) requires a 68020 Mac or better. Availability: By anonymous ftp from: ftp.apple.com:/dts/mac/sys.soft/speech There are 3 files in this directory: 6273632 Aug 14 22:51 macintalk-pro.hqx PlainTalk Text-To-Speech 1.0 speech synthesizer extension (includes Female Voice, Compressed); TTS Female Voice; TTS Male Voice; and TTS Male Voice, Compressed. Requires 68020 or better! 370108 Aug 13 04:30 speech-manager-docs.hqx Apple DocViewer format (Inside Macintosh style, no installation instructions - just drag everything onto your closed System Folder). 262569 Aug 7 07:01 speech-manager.hqx Speech Manager 1.1.1 (includes Marvin's voice) and MacInTalk Voices 1.1.1 (9 more voices). Runs most Macs. Package: Various Mac Speech Output Applications Platform: Macintosh Cost: Free (except for At Ease) Description: Some of the Speech Manager aware text-to-speech (TTS) applications, etc. are listed below (there are more on the Apple Developer CD-ROMs). Application, etc. Source Comments _________________ ________ _________________________________________________ AddressSpeech info-mac 4D talking address book (from Speech Pack 2.0) At Ease 2.0 MacWarehouse Friendly desktop that speaks file names At Ease 2.0 WG MacWarehouse Friendly desktop that speaks file names Eliza 3.1 AOL Talking Eliza (Rogerian psych therapist) FB speech Inside Basic Mag, volume 3, no. 6. FutureBasic demo FB Speech demo Inside Basic Mag, volume 3, no. 7. FutureBasic demo Fortune 1.1 info-mac Like a talking UNIX fortune command - slick Homer 0.92d9 zaphod.ee.pitt.edu GUI IRC client, assign nicks voices - slick MacMessage 1.0 FirstClassBBS Share talking messages/customizable startup Say info-mac MPW Tool which converts standard input to speech ScriptTools 1.2 info-mac Write AppleScript scripts to say text messages Siege Watch 1.01f info-mac Wryly political speaking clock SoToSpeak1.0.0b10 info-mac Two voice conversation (also see Fortune's About) Speak It! info-mac Type in a message and have it spoken Speaker 1.11 info-mac Simple text file editor, speaks on , macros Speecher 1.2.1 info-mac Customizable word pronunciation/substitution SpeechManagerdemo info-mac Command line interface, C source, aka -explorer Speech Pack 2.0 info-mac 4th Dimension external, add speech to database SpeechUnitEx info-mac Pascal source code for speech in Lab 7 speek-02b info-mac Speech XCMD for HyperCard TalkingClockPro2.0info-mac AppleScriptable talking clock extension (2.0b0) TeachText 7.2 AV Mac Apple's talking TeachText (simple editor w/QT) Tex-Edit 1.9 AOL Talking word processor, McSink like, modeming VoiceDemo 1.0.1 info-mac Bare bones phrase talker Welcome!v1.3.1 info-mac A talking Welcome to Macintosh startup ? ? Talking Plug-In-Module for MS Word 5, experimental, unsupported, buggy, beware! Speech Rhythms AOL A cool text file for one of the above apps _____ Sources: AOL = America Online info-mac = {ftp sumex-aim.stanford.edu, ftp wuarchive.wustl.edu, et al.} MacWarehouse = (800) 255-6227 Apple's work in spoken language technologies and systems is described in: Lee, Kai-Fu. "The Conversational Computer: An Apple Perspective." (Keynote Speech) In Proc. Eurospeech in Berlin, ESCA, September, 1993. Package: MacinTalk Platform: Macintosh Cost: Free Description: Formant based speech synthesis. There is also a program called "tex-edit" which apparently can pronounce English sentences reasonably using Macintalk. Note: MacinTalk doesn't run reliably on Macintosh's with new sound hardware under the lastest OS (System 7.1 w/HUD 2.0). More recent software is listed above. Availability: By anonymous ftp from many archive sites (have a look on archie if you can). tex-edit is on many of the same sites. Try wuarchive.wustl.edu:/mirrors2/info-mac/Old/card/macintalk.hqx[.Z] /macintalk-stack.hqx[.Z] wuarchive.wustl.edu:/mirrors2/info-mac/app/tex-edit-15.hqx Package: Lernout & Hauspie Text-To-Speech SDK Platform: IBM-Compatible Description: The L&H Text-to-Speech software developers kit is able to integrate text-to-speech technology with your own or existing PC applications under Microsoft Windows 3.1. This software will allow conversion of written text into clear human sounding synthetic speech. Requirements: IBM-compatible PC 386 DX(33Mhz) or higher, 8Mb RAM, MS DOS 5.0(or higher), MS Windows 3.1 (or higher), Compiler and linker: Microsoft(R) Visual C++ or Borland C++, Windows(TM) 3.1 compatible sound card, preferably 16 bit e.g. Soundblaster, Windows Sounds System, Pro Audio Spectrum Price: Unconfirmed $1,999 per copy, and $499 per each additional language (American English, French, German, or Spanish). Contact: USA (617) 932-4118 Package: Tinytalk Platform: PC Description: Shareware package is a speech 'screen reader' which is use by many blind users. Availability: By anonymous ftp from handicap.shel.isc-br.com. Get the files /speech/ttexe145.zip & /speech/ttdoc145.zip. Package: Narrator - narrator.device Platform: Amiga Description: Formant based speech synthesis. Includes a Engish-to-phoneme translation library, and a SPEAK: pseudo-device for speech output. Hardware: Standard Amiga hardware Availability: Part of AmigaOS Product Series: Infovox Description: Multilingual Text-to-speech systems, languages available: American English, British English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Danish and Finnish. Product name: INFOVOX 500, PC BOARD * Product description: Half length expansion board for IBM PC, XT, AT, PS/2 model 30 or compatible personal computers. The board can also be connected via the serial port. Language and control program for downloading into RAM or mounted on EPROMs. * Platform: for IBM PC, XT, AT, PS/2 model 30 or compatible Product name: INFOVOX 600, OEM BOARD * Product description: OEM board built with CMOS IC's. Language and control program are stored in on-board fixed memory. * Platform: any, Interface: 9-pole D-SUB (RS 232-C) 300-9600 Baud Product name: INFOVOX 700, DESKTOP UNIT * Product description: Desktop unit with built in Infovox 600 to be connected to any computer or terminal via an RS 232-C serial interface. Built in loudspeaker and rechargable battery for 4 hours use, and control knobs for continuous control of speech volume and speed. * Platform: any Product name: INFOVOX 650, OEM BOARD * Product description: OEM-board built with CMOS IC's. Language and control program are stored in on-board memory. * Platform:any, Interface: 9 pole D-SUB (RS 232-C) 300-9600 Baud Product name: INFOVOX 750, DESKTOP UNIT * Product description: Desktop unit with built in Infovox 650 to be connected to any computer or terminal via an RS 232-C serial interface. Built in loudspeaker and rechargable battery for 5 hours use, and a control knob for continuous control of speech volume. * Platform: any Misc: Infovox multi-lingual Text-to-Speech Technologies can interface with Apple's PlainTalk System. It enables Apple Third party developers to write application software with synthetic speech output using their usual Apple Plain Talk Text-to-Speech interface. Software already written for the English speaking market using Apple Plain Talk can be now distributed worldwide, provided message strings are translated. Contact: TELIA PROMOTOR INFOVOX AB TTS Sales Division P.O. Box 2069 S-171 02 Solna, Sweden Ph: +46 8 764 35 00 Fax: +46 8 735 78 76 email: tts-sales@infovox.se SIMTEL-20 The following is a list of speech related software available from SIMTEL-20 and its mirror sites for PCs. The SIMTEL internet address is WSMR-SIMTEL20.Army.Mil [192.88.110.20] Try looking at your nearest archive site first. Directory PD1: Filename Type Length Date Description ============================================== AUTOTALK.ARC B 23618 881216 Digitized speech for the PC CVOICE.ARC B 21335 891113 Tells time via voice response on PC HEARTYPE.ARC B 10112 880422 Hear what you are typing, crude voice synth. HELPME2.ARC B 8031 871130 Voice cries out 'Help Me!' from PC speaker SAY.ARC B 20224 860330 Computer Speech - using phonemes SPEECH98.ZIP B 41003 910628 Build speech (voice) on PC using 98 phonemes TALK.ARC B 8576 861109 BASIC program to demo talking on a PC speaker TRAN.ARC B 39766 890715 Repeats typed text in digital voice VDIGIT.ZIP B 196284 901223 Toolkit: Add digitized voice to your programs VGREET.ARC B 45281 900117 Voice says good morning/afternoon/evening Package: Bliss Contact: Dr. John Merus (Brown University) Mertus@browncog.bitnet Package: xxx Platform: (PC, Mac, Sun, NeXt etc) Rough Cost: (if appropriate) Description: (keep it brief) Hardware: (requirement list) Availability: (ftp info, email contact or company contact) Can anyone provide information on the following: MultiVoice Monolog TrueSpeech from DSP Group Inc. The range of recently released Windows products Please email or post suitable information for this list. Commercial, public domain and research packages are all appropriate. ======================================================================= SECTION 6 - Speech Recognition Q6.1: What is speech recognition? Automatic speech recognition is the process by which a computer maps an acoustic speech signal to text. Automatic speech understanding is the process by which a computer maps an acoustic speech signal to some form of abstract meaning of the speech. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Q6.2: How can I build a very simple speech recogniser? Doug Danforth provides a detailed account in article 253 in the comp.speech archives - also available as file info/DIY_Speech_Recognition. The first part is reproduced here. QUICKY RECOGNIZER sketch: Here is a simple recognizer that should give you 85%+ recognition accuracy. The accuracy is a function of WHAT words you have in your vocabulary. Long distinct words are easy. Short similar words are hard. You can get 98+% on the digits with this recognizer. Overview: (1) Find the begining and end of the utterance. (2) Filter the raw signal into frequency bands. (3) Cut the utterance into a fixed number of segments. (4) Average data for each band in each segment. (5) Store this pattern with its name. (6) Collect training set of about 3 repetitions of each pattern (word). (7) Recognize unknown by comparing its pattern against all patterns in the training set and returning the name of the pattern closest to the unknown. Many variations upon the theme can be made to improve the performance. Try different filtering of the raw signal and different processing methods. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Q6.2: What does speaker dependent/adaptive/independent mean? A speaker dependent system is developed (trained) to operate for a single speaker. These systems are usually easier to develop, cheaper to buy and more accurate, but are not as flexible as speaker adaptive or speaker independent systems. A speaker independent system is developed (trained) to operate for any speaker or speakers of a particular type (e.g. male/female, American/English). These systems are the most difficult to develop, most expensive and currently accuracy is not as good. They are the most flexible. A speaker adaptive system is developed to adapt its operation for new speakers that it encounters usually based on a general model of speaker characteristics. It lies somewhere between speaker independent and speaker dependent systems. Each type of system is suited to different applications and domains. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Q6.3: What does small/medium/large/very-large vocabulary mean? The size of vocabulary of a speech recognition system affects the complexity, processing requirements and the accuracy of the system. Some applications only require a few words (e.g. numbers only), others require very large dictionaries (e.g. dictation machines). There are no established definitions but the following may be a helpful guide. small vocabulary - tens of words medium vocabulary - hundreds of words large vocabulary - thousands of words very-large vocabulary - tens of thousands of words. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Q6.4: What does continuous speech or isolated-word mean? An isolated-word system operates on single words at a time - requiring a pause between saying each word. This is the simplest form of recognition to perform, because the pronunciation of the words tends not affect each other. Because the occurrences of each particular word are similar they are easier to recognise. A continuous speech system operates on speech in which words are connected together, i.e. not separated by pauses. Continuous speech is more difficult to handle because of a variety of effects. First, it is difficult to find the start and end points of words. Another problem is "coarticulation". The production of each phoneme is affected by the production of surrounding phonemes, and similarly the the start and end of words are affected by the preceding and following words. The recognition of continuous speech is also affected by the rate of speech (fast speech tends to be harder). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Q6.5: How is speech recognition done? A wide variety of techniques are used to perform speech recognition. There are many types of speech recognition. There are many levels of speech recognition/processing/understanding. Typically speech recognition starts with the digital sampling of speech. The next stage would be acoustic signal processing. Common techniques include a variety of spectral analyses, LPC analysis, the cepstral transform, cochlea modelling and many, many more. The next stage will typically try to recognise phonemes, groups of phonemes or words. This stage can be achieved by many processes such as DTW (Dynamic Time Warping), HMM (hidden Markov modelling), NNs (Neural Networks), and sometimes expert systems. In crude terms, all these processes to recognise the patterns of speech. The most advanced systems are statistically motivated. Some systems utilise knowledge of grammar to help with the recognition process. Some systems attempt to utilise prosody (pitch, stress, rhythm etc) to process the speech input. Some systems try to "understand" speech. That is, they try to convert the words into a representation of what the speaker intended to mean or achieve by what they said. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Q6.6: What are some good references/books on recognition? Some general introduction books on speech recognition: Fundamentals of Speech Recognition; Lawrence Rabiner & Biing-Hwang Juang Englewood Cliffs NJ: PTR Prentice Hall (Signal Processing Series), c1993 ISBN 0-13-015157-2 Speech recognition by machine; W.A. Ainsworth London: Peregrinus for the Institution of Electrical Engineers, c1988 Speech synthesis and recognition; J.N. Holmes Wokingham: Van Nostrand Reinhold, c1988 Douglas O'Shaughnessy -- Speech Communication: Human and Machine Addison Wesley series in Electrical Engineering: Digital Signal Processing, 1987. Electronic speech recognition: techniques, technology and applications edited by Geoff Bristow, London: Collins, 1986 Readings in Speech Recognition; edited by Alex Waibel & Kai-Fu Lee. San Mateo: Morgan Kaufmann, c1990 More specific books/articles: Hidden Markov models for speech recognition; X.D. Huang, Y. Ariki, M.A. Jack. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, c1990 Automatic speech recognition: the development of the SPHINX system; by Kai-Fu Lee; Boston; London: Kluwer Academic, c1989 Prosody and speech recognition; Alex Waibel (Pitman: London) (Morgan Kaufmann: San Mateo, Calif) 1988 S. E. Levinson, L. R. Rabiner and M. M. Sondhi, "An Introduction to the Application of the Theory of Probabilistic Functions of a Markov Process to Automatic Speech Recognition" in Bell Syst. Tech. Jnl. v62(4), pp1035--1074, April 1983 R. P. Lippmann, "Review of Neural Networks for Speech Recognition", in Neural Computation, v1(1), pp 1-38, 1989. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Q6.7: What speech recognition packages are available? Information is included below on the following packages:- Voice Blaster Ver. 4.0 Votan HTK (HMM Toolkit) DragonDictate VoiceServer for Windows IN3 Voice Command for Windows IN3 Voice Command SayIt Recnet Voice Command Line Interface DATAVOX Package Name: Voice Blaster Ver. 4.0 Platform: IBM AT or higher, DOS or Wndows 3.1 Description: Uses a Sound Blaster or compatible board. Contains a microphone headset and a connector for LPT1:. A printer can still be used on LPT1:. Will recognize 1024 words that are trained by the operator. Each word activates a macro that can enter an ascii word on the screen or into a word processor or invoke a batch file. An optional footswitch may be installed. Software to run under DOS or Windows 3.1 is included. Cost: Around $150 Canadian. Contact: COVOX Inc. 675 Conger Street Eugene, Oregon 97402 Ph: (503) 342-1271 Fax: (503) 342-1283 BBS: (503) 342-4135 Package Name: Votan Platform: MS-DOS, SCO UNIX Description: Isolated word and continuous speech modes, speaker dependant and (limited) speaker independent. Vocab size is 255 words or up to a fixed memory limit - but it is possible to dynamically load different words for effectively unlimited number of words. Rough Cost: Approx US $1,000-$1,500 Requirements: Cost includes one Votan Voice Recognition ISA-bus board for 386/486-based machines. A software development system is also available for DOS and Unix. Misc: Up to 8 Votan boards may co-exist for 8 simultaneous voice users. A telephone interface is also available. There is also a 4GL and a software development system. Apparently there is more than one version - more info required. Contact: 800-877-4756, 510-426-5600 Package Name: HTK (HMM Toolkit) - From Entropic Platform: Range of Unix platforms. Description: HTK is a software toolkit for building continuous density HMM based speech recognisers. It consists of a number of library modules and a number of tools. Functions include speech analysis, training tools, recognition tools, results analysis, and an interactive tool for speech labelling. Many standard forms of continuous density HMM are possible. Can perform isolated word or connected word speech recognition. It van model whole words, sub- word units. Can perform speaker verification and other pattern recognition work using HMMs. HTK is now integerated with the ESPS/Waves speech research environment which is described in Section 1.8 of this posting. Misc: The availability of HTK changed in early 1993 when Entropic obtained exclusive marketing rights to HTK from the developers at Cambridge. Cost: On request. Contact: Entropic Research Laboratory, Washington Research Laboratory, 600 Pennsylvania Ave, S.E. Suite 202, Washington, D.C. 20003 (202) 547-1420. email - info@wrl.epi.com Package Name: DragonDictate-30K Platform: PC Description: Speaker dependent/adaptive system requiring words to be separated by short pauses. Vocabulary of 25,000 words including a "custom" word set. Rough Cost: $5000 Requirements: Minimum of 20 Mhz 386 with 8M memory and 10M disk space Contact: Dragon Systems Inc. 90 Bridge Street, Newton MA 02158 Tel: 1-617-965-5200, Fax: 1-617-527-0372 Package Name: VoiceServer for Windows Platform: PC Description: Speaker dependent, each with an independent directory. Isolated word. Upto 1000 words/user, 300 words/window. 1 word occupies 2Kb on hard disk. Can be used to control Windows applications by issuing voice commands instead of menu selection. Rough Cost: 292 Pounds(UK) Requirements: None Misc: Price includes a half-sized AT voice card (including a DSP), software, documentation & a microphone (attachable to keyboard or speaker). A light-weight high-spec headset is an optional extra. Contact: Mark Redwood Applied Voice Technologies 26 Danbury Street, Islington, London, UK, N1 8JU Ph: + 44 71 454 1224 : Fax: + 44 71 454 1225 Package Name: IN3 Voice Command for Windows Platform: PC with Windows 3.1 Description: IN3 is now available for MS-Windows. Users can call applications to the foreground with voice commands. Once the application is called, the user may enter commands and data with voice commands. Voice macros can reduce the strain of repetitive stress injuries (RSI) such as Carpel Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) by replacing heavy repetitive keyboard hammering with simple voice operations. Voice macros take complex operations and reduce them to simple verbal commands. Voice input can provide new facilities for tasks which could not easily have been otherwise performed without the multiple axis of input. IN3 is hardware-independent, users with any Windows-compatible audio add speech recognition to the desktop. IN3 works with either 8 bit or 16 bit Windows audio boards. IN3 is based on continuous word-spotting technology. A developer API is also available for creating voice-enabled applications. Price: $179 U.S. Requirements: PC with 80386 processor or better, Microsoft Windows 3.1, and Windows compatible audio system with microphone. Misc: Fully functional demos are available on Compuserve in various Multimedia and CAD forums. Demos are also available from "America on Line", the comp.binaries.ms-windows archive sites, and various BBS systems. It is also available by anonymous ftp as ftp.wustl.edu:/usenet/comp.binaries.ms-windows/v3/in3demo.zip ftp.uwasa.fi:/mirror/ultrasound/demo/in3demo.zip An equivilant Sun product is described below. Contact: Brantley Kelly Email: cbk@gacc.atl.ga.us CIS: 75120,431 FAX: 1-404-925-7924 Phone: 1-404-925-7950 Command Corp. Inc, 3675 Crestwood Parkway, Duluth GA 30136, USA Package Name: IN3 Voice Command Platform: Sun SPARCstation Description: IN3 provides a secure, robust, word spotting, continuous speech recognition facility for the Sun OS or Solaris operating systems. The recognition system is a secure operating system facility capable of working with various interfaces, microphones, and devices. The operating system interface works with native UNIX outside of X Windows as well as provides enhanced X Windows facilities including named window support. The user interface provides a means to quickly create commands on the fly for replacing long strings and complex operations with voice macros. [Voice macros can reduce the strain of repetitive stress injuries (RSI) such as Carpel Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) by replacing heavy repetitive keyboard hammering with simple voice operations. ] The IN3 user interface works with generic X servers and window managers. A developer API is also available for creating voice- enabled applications, interfacing with other audio sources, and providing extensive application control over the recognition facility. Availability: SunSite archive at SunSITE.unc.edu as well as on Catalyst CDware as both a runable demo and unlockable software. Hardware Required: Sun SPARCstation with audio input. Noise canceling microphone recommended but not required. Software Required: Sun OS 4.1.2 with OpenWindows 3.0 or Sun OS 4.1.3 or Solaris 2.1 or Solaris 2.2 Misc: An equivilant MS-Windows product is described above. Price: $495 U.S. Contact: Brantley Kelly Email: cbk@gacc.atl.ga.us CIS: 75120,431 FAX: 1-404-925-7924 Phone: 1-404-925-7950 Command Corp. Inc, 3675 Crestwood Parkway, Duluth GA 30136, USA Package Name: Phonetic Engine 400 (PE400) - Speech Systems, Inc. Platform: PC Description: Speaker independent, large vocabulary, continuous speech recognition for MS Windows or DOS. Rough Cost: $1195 US dollars. Includes board, microphone, developer kit, documentation, 2 days of technical training and 90 days of technical support. Requirements: IBM AT class machine or better plus 5M disk space. Most processing is performed on-board (4M standard or 16M upgrade). Misc: Requires developer to provide a context-free grammar. Vocabulary size unknown (quotes from 500 - 2000 words per grammar), but dynamic grammar switching capabilities may increase the effective vocabulary size. Development system includes lower-level C,C++ library (VoiceLib), higher-level DLL (SPOT) callable from many languages, SPOT/VBX, a custom control for Visual Basic and Visual C++. Contact: Speech Systems, Inc. 2945 Center Green Court South Boulder, CO 80301-2275, USA Tel: 303.938.1110 Fax: 303.938.1874 Package Name: SayIt Platform: Sun SPARCstation Description: Voice recognition and macro building package for Suns in the Openwindows 3.0 environment. Speaker dependent discrete speech recognition. Vocabularies can be associated to applications and the active vocabulary follows the application that has input focus. Macros can include mouse commands, keystrokes, Unix commands, sound, Openwindow actions and more. An evaluation copy is available by email. Hardware: Microphone required (SunMicrophone is fine). Cost: $US295 Contact: Phone: 1-800-245-UNIX or 1-415-572-0200 Fax: 1-415-572-1300 Email: info@qualix.com Package Name: recnet Platform: UNIX Description: Speech recognition for the speaker independent TIMIT and Resource Management tasks. It uses recurrent networks to estimate phone probabilities and Markov models to find the most probable sequence of phones or words. The system is a snapshot of evolving research code. There is no documentation other than published research papers. The components are: 1. A preprocessor which implements many standard and many non- standard front end processing techniques. 2. A recurrent net recogniser and parameter files 3. Two Markov model based recognisers, one for phone recognition and one for word recognition 4. A dynamic programming scoring package The complete system performs competatively. Cost: Free Requirements: TIMIT and Resource Management databases Contact: ajr@eng.cam.ac.uk (Tony Robinson) Availability: by FTP from "svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk" as /misc/recnet-1.3.tar.Z Package Name: Voice Command Line Interface Platform: Amiga Description: VCLI will execute CLI commands, ARexx commands, or ARexx scripts by voice command through your audio digitizer. VCLI allows you to launch multiple applications or control any program with an ARexx capability entirely by spoken voice command. VCLI is fully multitasking and will run in the background, continuously listening for your voice commands even while other programs are running. Documentation is provided in AmigaGuide format. VCLI 6.0 runs under either Amiga DOS 2.0 or 3.0. Cost: Free? Requirements: Supports the DSS8, PerfectSound 3, Sound Master, Sound Magic, and Generic audio digitizers. Availability: by ftp from wuarchive.wustl.edu in the file systems/amiga/incoming/audio/VCLI60.lha and from amiga.physik.unizh.ch as the file pub/aminet/util/misc/VCLI60.lha Contact: Author's email is RHorne@cup.portal.com Package Name: DATAVOX - French Platform: PC Description: Continuous speech - speaker independent or dependent. Rough Cost: ? Requirements: 2 PC format boards (RdF1000 and TdS 96/25) and an A/D - D/A module (ASA116) Misc: Application software may dialog with DATAVOX through 2 types of interfaces : 1) Keyboard overlay The application software may be used with any PC compatible package. No specific adaptation is necessary, you only need to define your configuration with the application software. 2) C library Allows a user-written program to drive the recognition system. DATAVOX is based on the AMADEUS speech recognition software developed at LIMSI. It provides - Continuous speech recognition with * speaker dependant : 500 words * speaker independant : 50 words (custom-made vocabulary). - Grammar of the application language (syntax acquisition, verification and simplification software). - Large vocabulary : DATAVOX can recognize vocabularies of several thousand words as long as there are no more than 500 words in the active vocabulary at any given node. It takes less than 1 second to change syntax and vocabulary. - Training controlled by the system (use of co-articulation models). - Response time less than 500 ms for any phrase length. - Synthetis (ADPCM) can be heard simultaneously while recognition is being carried out. Contact: VECSYS, Le Chene rond, 91570 Bievres, France Fax: 33 1 69 41 24 30 Voice: 33 1 69 41 15 04 Package: PowerSecretary Platform: Mac Price: $US5,000 (including a Centris or Quadra AV) Availability: Articulate Systems Inc. 600 W. Cummings Park, Suite 4500 Woburn, MA 01801 Ph: (617) 935-5656 Fax: (617) 935-0490. Pacakge: ICSS system from IBM Description: A large vocabulary, speaker independent, continuous speech system which runs under Windows, OS/2, and AIX. Requirements: Soundboard (e.g. Soundblaster) Price: ? Contact: ? Package: Creative VoiceAssist Platform: PC (?) Price: $US99.95 Contact: Creative Labs Ph: 1-800-998-5227 Package Name: xxx Platform: PC, Mac, UNIX, Amiga .... Description: (e.g. isolated word, speaker independent...) Rough Cost: (if applicable) Requirements: (hardware/software needs - if applicable) Misc: Contact: (email, ftp or address) Can anyone provide info on Verbex Listen for Windows Voice Navigator (from Articulate Systems) SRI Recognisers BBN Recognisers Can you provide information on any other software/hardware/packages? Commercial, public domain and research packages are all appropriate. Andrew Hunt Speech Technology Research Group Ph: 61-2-692 4509 Dept. of Electrical Engineering Fax: 61-2-692 3847 University of Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia email: andrewh@speech.su.oz.au