Section: Application Domains

Aided communication and monitoring

Speech technologies provide ways of helping people in handicapped situations or improving their autonomy. The following applications are considered in the project.

The first one is related to the tuning of speech recognition technology for providing a means of communication between a speaking person and a hard-of-hearing or a deaf person, through an adequate display of the recognized words and/or syllables, which takes also into account the reliability of the recognized items.

The second application aims at improving pathological voices. In this context, the goal is typically to transform the pathological voice signal in order to make it more intelligible. Ongoing work deals with esophageal voices, i.e., substituted voice learned by a laryngectomized patient who has lost his/her vocal cords after surgery. Voice conversion techniques will be studied further to enhance such voice signals, in order to produce clean and intelligible speech signals in replacement of the pathological voice.

The third application aims at improving the autonomy of elderly or disabled people, and fit with smartrooms. In a first step, source separation techniques could be tuned and should help for locating and monitoring people through the detection of sound events inside apartments. In a longer perspective, adapting speech recognition technologies to the voice of elder people should also be useful for such applications, but this requires the recording of adequate databases. Sound monitoring in other application fields (security, environmental monitoring) could also be envisaged.