Speech-- What is it?

Abstract

Speech recognition focuses on the automatic recognition of words by a machine and natural language processing on machine understanding and/or generation of human language. We study other information that is present in speech and speech-like vocal emissions.

Our programs identify landmarks, points in an utterance around which listeners extract information about the underlying distinctive features, ala Ken Stevens' acoustic model of speech. I will talk about the techniques we use analyze acoustic signals and several applications we have built using these techniques.

Our applications include EVA (Early Vocalization Analyzer) to detect medical information in infant babbles, visiBabble, a system that provides real-time visual feedback to encourage vocalization in infants, and detection of emotion in speech.