Eric Janke

Storywriter: a speech oriented editor

Yorktown Heights, NY 10598 danis@watson.ibm. com Repetitive Stress Injury (RSI), a disorder that curtails repetitive movements such as typing and poses a potentially career-ending problem for people who write for a living, motivated our development of the StoryWriter editor. This editor accepts speech and keyboard input for text creation and six types of input for application control functions (speech, keyboard, mouse, foot pedal and two novel techniques, pointer touch and point and speak). The variability of RSI symptomatology dictated that several input methods be integrated seamlessly, The system can also be used efficiently by unimpaired individuals.

Multilingual acoustic models for speech recognition and synthesis

In this paper, we review the design of a common phone alphabet for up to fifteen languages and describe its application in two important components of a seamless multilingual conversational system, namely speech recognition and synthesis. We report on experiments that demonstrate the advantages of multilingual acoustic models both for the recognition of foreign names and non-native speech, and describe the usefulness of a common phone alphabet for the construction of unit selection based mono- and bilingual speech synthesis systems.

Multilingual Acoustic Models for Speech Recognition in Low-Resource Devices

Multilingual access to information and services is a key requirement in any pervasive or ubiquitous computing environment. In this paper we review the design of a common alphabet for up to fifteen languages and describe its application to multilingual speech recognition in low-resource devices in real-time. We give an overview of the special requirements for acoustic modeling in such environments and present initial results of a technique that aims on a more efficient discrimination between languages in training while keeping low memory footprint. We also report the usefulness of a multilingual recognizer as a language-independent system to bootstrap a new language.