Speech processing

Acoustics is a branch of physics and is the study of sound, mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician. The application of acoustics in technology is called acoustical engineering. There is often much overlap and interaction between the interests of acousticians and acoustical engineers. "... acoustics is characterized by its reliance on combinations of physical principles drawn from other sources; and that the primary task of modern physical acoustic ...

Including:

• Acoustics - Sound pressure level SPL
• Acoustics - Measurement methods
• Acoustics - Reverberation and anechoic rooms
• Acoustics - Helmholtz resonator
• Acoustics - Rectangular boxes

Read more here: » Acoustics: Encyclopedia - Acoustics

Cluttering is a communicative disorder that involves short attention span, inability to listen, and difficulties with syntax. Cluttering is similar to, and is often confused with, the speech disorder stuttering. Like stuttering, cluttering involves excessive breaks in the normal flow of speech, but unlike stuttering, cluttering is also characterized by disfluency that seems to result from disorganized speech planning, talking too fast or in spurts, or simply being unsure of what one wants to say. By contrast, a person who stutt ...

Read more here: » Cluttering: Encyclopedia - Cluttering

Stuttering (known as stammering in parts of the UK and scientifically known as dysphemia) is a speech disorder in which the normal flow of speech is frequently disrupted by repetitions (sounds, syllables, words or phrases), pauses and prolongations that differ both in frequency and severity from those of normally fluent individuals. The term stuttering is most commonly associated with involuntary sound repetition, but it also encompasses the abnormal hesitation or pausing before speech, referred to b ...

Including:

• Stuttering - Causes
• Stuttering - Genetics
• Stuttering - Childhood development
• Stuttering - Neurophysiology
• Stuttering - Other causes
• Stuttering - Onset and development
• Stuttering - Characteristics
• Stuttering - Fluency
• Stuttering - Blocking
• Stuttering - Avoidance behavior
• Stuttering - Severity
• Stuttering - Treatments
• Stuttering - Behavioral and cognitive therapy
• Stuttering - Medication
• Stuttering - Electronic fluency aids
• Stuttering - Stuttering and society
• Stuttering - Stuttering in Music
• Stuttering - Resources
• Stuttering - Notes
• Stuttering - References
• Stuttering - External links

Read more here: » Stuttering: Encyclopedia - Stuttering

Modern speech recognition systems are generally based on hidden Markov models (HMMs). This is a statistical model which outputs a sequence of symbols or quantities. Having a model which gives us the probability of an observed sequence of acoustic data given one or another word (or word sequence) will enable us to work out the most likely word sequence by the application of Bayes' rule: For a given sequence of acoustic data (think Wave file), Pr(acoustics) is a constant and can be ignored. Pr(word) is the prior pro ...

See also:

Speech recognition, Speech recognition - Classification, Speech recognition - Use, Speech recognition - Technical issues, Speech recognition - Market players, Speech recognition - For further information, Speech recognition - Community and open-source resources, Speech recognition - Telephony/server-side speech recognition

Read more here: » Speech recognition: Encyclopedia II - Speech recognition - Technical issues

There are two main technologies used for the generating synthetic speech waveforms: concatenative synthesis and formant synthesis. Speech synthesis - Concatenative synthesis. Concatenative synthesis is based on the concatenation (or stringing together) of segments of recorded speech. Generally, concatenative synthesis gives the most natural sounding synthesized speech. However, natural variation in speech and automated techniques for segmenting the waveforms sometimes result in audible glitches in the output, detracting from the naturalness. Ther ...

See also:

Speech synthesis, Speech synthesis - Overview of speech synthesis technology, Speech synthesis - History, Speech synthesis - Synthesizer technologies, Speech synthesis - Concatenative synthesis, Speech synthesis - Formant synthesis, Speech synthesis - Other synthesis methods, Speech synthesis - Front-end challenges, Speech synthesis - Text normalization challenges, Speech synthesis - Text-to-phoneme challenges, Speech synthesis - Speech synthesis markup languages

Read more here: » Speech synthesis: Encyclopedia II - Speech synthesis - Synthesizer technologies

Modern speech recognition systems are generally based on hidden Markov models (HMMs). This is a statistical model which outputs a sequence of symbols or quantities. Having a model which gives us the probability of an observed sequence of acoustic data given one or another word (or word sequence) will enable us to work out the most likely word sequence by the application of Bayes' rule: For a given sequence of acoustic data (think Wave file), Pr(acoustics) is a constant and can be ignored. Pr(word) is the prior pro ...

See also:

Speech recognition, Speech recognition - Classification, Speech recognition - Use, Speech recognition - Technical issues, Speech recognition - Market players, Speech recognition - For further information, Speech recognition - community and open-source resources, Speech recognition - telephony/server-side speech recognition

Read more here: » Speech recognition: Encyclopedia II - Speech recognition - Technical issues

The two characteristics used to describe the quality of of a speech synthesis system are naturalness and intelligibility. The naturalness of a speech synthesizer refers to how much the output sounds like the speech of a real person. The intelligibility of a speech synthesizer refers to how easily the output can be understood. The ideal speech synthesizer is both natural and intelligible, and each of the different synthesis technologies try to maximize both of these characteristics. Some of the technologies are bet ...

See also:

Speech synthesis, Speech synthesis - Overview of speech synthesis technology, Speech synthesis - History, Speech synthesis - Synthesizer technologies, Speech synthesis - Concatenative synthesis, Speech synthesis - Formant synthesis, Speech synthesis - Other synthesis methods, Speech synthesis - Front-end challenges, Speech synthesis - Text normalization challenges, Speech synthesis - Text-to-phoneme challenges, Speech synthesis - Speech synthesis markup languages

Read more here: » Speech synthesis: Encyclopedia II - Speech synthesis - Synthesizer technologies

The amplitude of a sound wave is usually characterized by its sound pressure. In a normal working environment, a very wide range of pressures can occur and it is therefore a convention that sound pressure is measured on a logarithmic scale using the decibel. If p is the rms sound pressure amplitude then the sound pressure level (SPL) is defined as 20 times the logarithm of the ratio of the pressure to some reference pressure. Sound pressure level SPL ...

See also:

Acoustics, Acoustics - Sound pressure level SPL, Acoustics - Measurement methods, Acoustics - Reverberation and anechoic rooms, Acoustics - Helmholtz resonator, Acoustics - Rectangular boxes

Read more here: » Acoustics: Encyclopedia II - Acoustics - Sound pressure level SPL

Stuttering - Fluency. Speech fluency consist of three variables: continuity, rate, and ease of speaking. Continuity refers to speech that flows without hesitation or stoppage. Rate refers the speed in which the words are spoken. For English-speaking adults, the mean overall speaking rate is 170 words per minute (w/m), substantially quicker than the approximately 120 w/m that stutterers produce.1 Ease of speaking refers to the amount of effort being expended to produc ...

See also:

Stuttering, Stuttering - Causes, Stuttering - Genetics, Stuttering - Childhood development, Stuttering - Neurophysiology, Stuttering - Other causes, Stuttering - Onset and development, Stuttering - Characteristics, Stuttering - Fluency, Stuttering - Blocking, Stuttering - Avoidance behavior, Stuttering - Severity, Stuttering - Treatments, Stuttering - Behavioral and cognitive therapy, Stuttering - Medication, Stuttering - Electronic fluency aids, Stuttering - Stuttering and society, Stuttering - Stuttering in Music, Stuttering - Resources, Stuttering - Notes, Stuttering - References, Stuttering - External links

Read more here: » Stuttering: Encyclopedia II - Stuttering - Characteristics

The challenge for developers of ASR engines is that the end customer judges them on one criterion: did it understand what I said? That leaves little room for differentiation. Of course, there are areas like multi-language support, tuning tools, integration API (the proposed standard MRCP or proprietary) , etc., but recognition quality is most visible. Because of the complex algorithms and language models required to implement a high-quality speech recognition engine, it is both difficult for new companies to enter this market as well as difficult for existing vendors to maintain the ...

See also:

Speech recognition, Speech recognition - Classification, Speech recognition - Use, Speech recognition - Technical issues, Speech recognition - Market players, Speech recognition - For further information, Speech recognition - community and open-source resources, Speech recognition - telephony/server-side speech recognition

Read more here: » Speech recognition: Encyclopedia II - Speech recognition - Market players

Commercial systems for speech recognition have been available off-the-shelf since the 1990s. Despite the apparent success of the technology, few people use such speech recognition systems on their desktop computers. It appears that most computer users can create and edit documents and interact with their computer more quickly with conventional input devices, a keyboard and mouse, despite the fact that most people are able to speak considerably faster than they can type. Using both keyboard and speech recognition simultaneously, however, can ...

See also:

Speech recognition, Speech recognition - Classification, Speech recognition - Use, Speech recognition - Technical issues, Speech recognition - Market players, Speech recognition - For further information, Speech recognition - Community and open-source resources, Speech recognition - Telephony/server-side speech recognition

Read more here: » Speech recognition: Encyclopedia II - Speech recognition - Use

Such systems can be classified as to Whether they require the user to "train" the system to recognise their own particular speech patterns or not. Whether the system is trained for one user only or is speaker independent. Whether the system can recognise continuous speech or requires users to break up their speech into discrete words. Whether the system is intended for clear speech material, or is designed to operate on distorted transfer channels (e.g., cellular telephones) and possibly background noi ...

See also:

Speech recognition, Speech recognition - Classification, Speech recognition - Use, Speech recognition - Technical issues, Speech recognition - Market players, Speech recognition - For further information, Speech recognition - Community and open-source resources, Speech recognition - Telephony/server-side speech recognition

Read more here: » Speech recognition: Encyclopedia II - Speech recognition - Classification

Voice production is the generation of sound in the human speech organs. For simplicity we begin our inquiry with the pure vowels, but our results will apply as well to other sounds, since diphthongs and many consonants also should be wholly or partly understood by formant analysis such as we will develop here for the pure vowels. The sound production with which we are concerned begins with compression of the lungs to create a reservoir of relatively high pressure, and a (often) continuous airflow up and out through the v ...

Read more here: » Voice production: Encyclopedia - Voice production

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and someone who engages in this study is called a linguist or linguistician. Linguistics - Dichotomies and language. The study of linguistics can be thought of along three major axes, the endpoints of which are described below: Synchronic vs Diachronic: Synchronic study of a language is concerned with its form at a given moment; Diachronic study covers the history of a language or family of languages an ...

Including:

• Linguistics - Dichotomies and language
• Linguistics - Levels of theoretical linguistics
• Linguistics - Diachronic linguistics
• Linguistics - Applied linguistics
• Linguistics - Contextual linguistics
• Linguistics - Individual speakers language communities and linguistic universals
• Linguistics - Prescription and description
• Linguistics - Speech versus writing
• Linguistics - Research areas of linguistics
• Linguistics - Interdisciplinary linguistic research
• Linguistics - Important linguists and schools of thought
• Linguistics - Representation of speech
• Linguistics - Narrower conceptions of linguistics

Read more here: » Linguistics: Encyclopedia - Linguistics

The challenge for developers of ASR engines is that the end customer judges them on one criterion: did it understand what I said? That leaves little room for differentiation. Of course, there are areas like multi-language support, tuning tools, integration API (the proposed standard MRCP or proprietary) , etc., but recognition quality is most visible. Because of the complex algorithms and language models required to implement a high-quality speech recognition engine, it is both difficult for new companies to enter this market as well as difficult for existing vendors to maintain the ...

See also:

Speech recognition, Speech recognition - Classification, Speech recognition - Use, Speech recognition - Technical issues, Speech recognition - Market players, Speech recognition - For further information, Speech recognition - Community and open-source resources, Speech recognition - Telephony/server-side speech recognition

Read more here: » Speech recognition: Encyclopedia II - Speech recognition - Market players

A text-to-speech system (or engine) is composed of two parts: a front-end and a back-end. Broadly, the front-end takes input in the form of text and outputs a symbolic linguistic representation. The back-end takes the symbolic linguistic representation as input and outputs the synthesized speech waveform. The front-end has two major tasks. First it takes the raw text and converts things like numbers and abbreviations into their written-out word equivalents. This process is often called text normalization, < ...

See also:

Speech synthesis, Speech synthesis - Overview of speech synthesis technology, Speech synthesis - History, Speech synthesis - Synthesizer technologies, Speech synthesis - Concatenative synthesis, Speech synthesis - Formant synthesis, Speech synthesis - Other synthesis methods, Speech synthesis - Front-end challenges, Speech synthesis - Text normalization challenges, Speech synthesis - Text-to-phoneme challenges, Speech synthesis - Speech synthesis markup languages

Read more here: » Speech synthesis: Encyclopedia II - Speech synthesis - Overview of speech synthesis technology

For centuries stuttering has often featured prominently in both popular culture and in society at large. Because of the unusual-sounding speech that is produced, as well as the behaviors and attitudes that accompany a stutter, stuttering has frequently been a subject of scientific interest, curiosity, discrimination, and ridicule. Stuttering was, and essentially still is, a riddle with a long history of interest and speculation into its causes and cures. Stutterers can be traced back centuries to the likes of Demosthenes, Aesop, and Aristotl ...

See also:

Stuttering, Stuttering - Causes, Stuttering - Genetics, Stuttering - Childhood development, Stuttering - Neurophysiology, Stuttering - Other causes, Stuttering - Onset and development, Stuttering - Characteristics, Stuttering - Fluency, Stuttering - Blocking, Stuttering - Avoidance behavior, Stuttering - Severity, Stuttering - Treatments, Stuttering - Behavioral and cognitive therapy, Stuttering - Medication, Stuttering - Electronic fluency aids, Stuttering - Stuttering and society, Stuttering - Stuttering in Music, Stuttering - Resources, Stuttering - Notes, Stuttering - References, Stuttering - External links

Read more here: » Stuttering: Encyclopedia II - Stuttering - Stuttering and society

There are many treatments for stuttering, none of which is 100% effective. Traditional speech therapy reduces the frequency and severity of a stutter and teaches stutterers to use effective communications skills, such as making eye contact. While not a cure, speech therapy can lead to more fluent speech patterns and is especially effective in early childhood. The duration or type of therapy needed varies among stutterers but usually involves both speech training (articulation, intonation, rate, intensity) and language training (phonology, mo ...

See also:

Stuttering, Stuttering - Causes, Stuttering - Genetics, Stuttering - Childhood development, Stuttering - Neurophysiology, Stuttering - Other causes, Stuttering - Onset and development, Stuttering - Characteristics, Stuttering - Fluency, Stuttering - Blocking, Stuttering - Avoidance behavior, Stuttering - Severity, Stuttering - Treatments, Stuttering - Behavioral and cognitive therapy, Stuttering - Medication, Stuttering - Electronic fluency aids, Stuttering - Stuttering and society, Stuttering - Stuttering in Music, Stuttering - Resources, Stuttering - Notes, Stuttering - References, Stuttering - External links

Read more here: » Stuttering: Encyclopedia II - Stuttering - Treatments

There is no known cause for stuttering. Theories about the causes of stuttering can be divided into three categories. Stuttering - Genetics. Stuttering could possibly be inherited, and 50% to 70% of all stutterers are related to another stutterer. 8 9 While having a stutterer in the family does not automatically create another stutterer, it has been shown to create "stuttering potential" or a "stuttering predisposition." This inherited genetic factor may ...

See also:

Stuttering, Stuttering - Causes, Stuttering - Genetics, Stuttering - Childhood development, Stuttering - Neurophysiology, Stuttering - Other causes, Stuttering - Onset and development, Stuttering - Characteristics, Stuttering - Fluency, Stuttering - Blocking, Stuttering - Avoidance behavior, Stuttering - Severity, Stuttering - Treatments, Stuttering - Behavioral and cognitive therapy, Stuttering - Medication, Stuttering - Electronic fluency aids, Stuttering - Stuttering and society, Stuttering - Stuttering in Music, Stuttering - Resources, Stuttering - Notes, Stuttering - References, Stuttering - External links

Read more here: » Stuttering: Encyclopedia II - Stuttering - Causes

Like most other speech disorders, stuttering begins in early childhood, when a child is first developing his or her speech and language skills. The vast majority of stutters develop between the ages of two and five, with many stutterers outgrowing their stutter before adolescence. Most stutters manifest before the age of 7, although there have been rare cases of a stutter developing later. Almost all children go through a stage of disfluency in early speech, but when a child displays signs of a serious stutter, it is wise to seek professiona ...

See also:

Stuttering, Stuttering - Causes, Stuttering - Genetics, Stuttering - Childhood development, Stuttering - Neurophysiology, Stuttering - Other causes, Stuttering - Onset and development, Stuttering - Characteristics, Stuttering - Fluency, Stuttering - Blocking, Stuttering - Avoidance behavior, Stuttering - Severity, Stuttering - Treatments, Stuttering - Behavioral and cognitive therapy, Stuttering - Medication, Stuttering - Electronic fluency aids, Stuttering - Stuttering and society, Stuttering - Stuttering in Music, Stuttering - Resources, Stuttering - Notes, Stuttering - References, Stuttering - External links

Read more here: » Stuttering: Encyclopedia II - Stuttering - Onset and development