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Hot Topics at Interspeech 2024: The Latest in Technology of Spoken Language Processing

Our team recently attended the 25th Interspeech Conference, held from September 1st to 5th on Kos Island, Greece. This year’s theme, "Speech and Beyond," highlighted new developments in speech technology, focusing on areas like healthcare diagnostics, virtual assistants, and even animal sound recognition. It was a great opportunity for experts worldwide to share their work and discuss the latest trends. Here are some of the key topics and insights we gathered from the event. A major topic at the

Published: October 1, 2024
# AI / ML
# Speech Processing
Voice Biometrics Recognition and Opportunities It Gives

Voice biometry is changing the way businesses operate by using distinctive features of a person's voice, like pitch and rhythm, to confirm their identity. This technology, a central part of Voice AI, turns these voice characteristics into digital "voiceprints" that are used for secure authentication. Unlike traditional methods such as fingerprint or facial recognition, voice biometry can be used remotely with just standard microphones, making it both practical and non-intrusive. This technology

Published: May 13, 2024
# AI / ML
# EdTech / LMS
# Speech Processing
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Systems Compared

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are becoming an increasingly important part of human-machine interaction. Simultaneously, they are still too expensive to develop from scratch. Companies need to choose between using a cloud API for an ASR system developed by tech giants or playing with open-source solutions. In this post, we compare eight of the most popular ASR systems to facilitate the choice for your project needs and team’s skills. We have conducted our tests to define the word err

Published: July 7, 2021
# Speech Processing
Text-to-Speech Synthesis: an Overview

In my childhood, one of the funniest interactions with a computer was to make it read a fairy tale. You could copy a text into a window and soon listen to a colorless metallic voice stumble through commas and stop weaving a weirdly accented story. At those times it was a miracle. Nowadays the goal of TTS — the Text-to-Speech conversion technology — is not to simply have machines talk, but to make them sound like humans of different ages and genders. In perspective, we’ll be able to listen to mac

Published: February 13, 2020
# Speech Processing
# AI / ML
Our Expectations from INTERSPEECH 2019

In less than a month, from Sep. 15–19, 2019, Graz, Austria will become home for INTERSPEECH, the world‘s most prominent conference on spoken language processing. The conference unites science and technology under one roof and becomes a platform for over 2000 participants who will share their insights, listen to eminent speakers, and attend tutorials, challenges, exhibitions, and satellite events. What are our expectations of it as participants and presenters? Tanja Schultz*, the spokesperson of

Published: August 29, 2019
# Speech Processing
# AI / ML
Top Speech-to-Speech Translation Apps — What’s New?

A year ago, we wrote a post about the best speech-to-speech translation apps as of 2017. Even though the same giants still dominate the market: who would imagine the modern world without, for example, Google Translate or Baidu in the East — the market landscape is changing with new products and trends emerging and they are worth mentioning. We cannot call Google Assistant just a translation app, of course, but, among other functionalities, it may be used as such. Based on Google Translate, is an

Published: January 30, 2019
# Speech Processing
# AI / ML
Towards Automatic Text Summarization: Extractive Methods

For those who had academic writing, summarization — _the task of producing a concise and fluent summary while preserving key information content and overall meaning —_ was if not a nightmare, then a constant challenge close to guesswork to detect what the professor would find important. Though the basic idea looks simple: find the gist, cut off all opinions and details, and write a couple of perfect sentences, the task inevitably ends up in toil and turmoil. On the other hand, in real life we ar

Published: January 23, 2019
# Speech Processing
# AI / ML
Interspeech 2018 Highlights

This year the Sciforce team has traveled as far as India to one of the most important events in the speech processing community, the Interspeech conference. It is a truly scientific conference, where every speech, poster, or demo is accompanied by a paper published in the ISCA journal. As usual, it covered most of the speech-related topics, and even more: automatic speech recognition (ASR) and generation (TTS), voice conversion and denoising, speaker verification and diarization, spoken dialogue

Published: December 4, 2018
# Computer Vision
# Speech Processing
# AI / ML
Interspeech 2017 flashback and 2018 expectations

Interspeech is the world’s largest and most comprehensive conference on the science and technology of spoken language processing. Interspeech 2017 gathered circa 2000 participants in Stockholm, Sweden and it exceeded expected capacity of the conference. There were lots of great people to to meet and to listen to Hideki Kawahara, Simon King, Jan Chrowski, Tara N. Sainath and many-many others. Papers acceptance rate traditionally was rather high at 51%. ICASSP 2017 had similar number, yet other ML

Published: August 31, 2018
# Computer Vision
# Speech Processing
# AI / ML
Top 8 Speech-to-Speech Translation Apps of 2017

One of the undeniable focuses of the coming year will be voice recognition technologies. The voice-control, voice-assistant revolution is pushing us to talk to objects in our homes and offices. Already in 2017, users began interacting more and more with their machines the same way we interact with each other: by talking. Alexa, Cortana, Einstein, Google, Siri, and Watson are already becoming valuable assistance and practically members of the family to some of us. But will we go beyond the intera

Published: February 2, 2018
# Speech Processing