Unit 1

Moiss A. Bittner
Phonetics and Phonology
Autumn Term
Speech Recognition
In computer science, speech recognition (SR) is the translation of
spoken words into text.

Also known as:

automatic speech recognition (ASR)
computer speech recognition
speech to text

Some SR systems use training where an individual speaker reads
sections of text into the SR system. These systems analyse the
person's specific voice and use it to fine tune the recognition of
that person's speech, resulting in more accurate transcription.

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Speech recognition applications include:
- voice user interfaces such as voice dialling (e.g. Call home)
- call routing (e.g. Id like to make a collect call from England to)
- domestic appliance control (e.g. windows, lightning, etc.)
- Internet search (e.g. find a podcast where particular words were
spoken)
- simple data entry (e.g., entering a credit card number)
- speech-to-text processing (e.g., word processors or e-mails)
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Voice recognition
The term voice recognition

refers to finding the identity of
who is speaking, rather than what they are saying.

Recognising the speaker can simplify the task of translating
speech in systems that have been trained on specific
person's voices or it can be used to authenticate or verify
the identity of a speaker as part of a security process.

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Forensic Phonetics
Area of phonetics that deals with questions in
which speaker identification is relevant to
solving a crime.

Prominent cases:
hoax calls to emergency numbers (e.g. 999)
sexual harassment calls
bank robberies in which robbers are masked
but recorded
telephone calls from kidnappers
crimes (e.g. rapes) in darkness in which
victim cannot see but hear the perpetrator.

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To a high degree we can identify speakers solely on the
basis of their voice. (e.g. in telephone calls)

- Every speaker has individual features in the acoustic
signal of his/her voice. (consonantal sounds, vocalic
sounds, pitch, intonation accent/dialect, social
background, age, mood).

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References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition
http://askbobrankin.com/voice_recognition.html
http://helenfraser.com.au/forensic/#section-2
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p7bxw
http://mural.uv.es/mboixpe/vocabulary.html
http://specgram.com/CLIII.3/08.phlogiston.cartoon.zayin.
html
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/pre
vious_issues/articles/2002_06_21/nodoi.1371985468449528
5209
Forensic Phonetics Volker Dellwo (2003) Phonetics &
Linguistics, Speech Sciences, UCL.


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