Speech Recognition Technology and Applications

Speech represents the most natural means of communication between humans. By using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems, machines also become able to interact with humans using speech. This is of particular importance for building interactive robots or speech-enabled chatbots. This book starts by exploring state-of-the-art ASR and TTS approaches, making use of artificial neural networks, relevant also to low-resource scenarios. Then, it explores the application of speech technology to specific domains, such as the medical domain, human-robot interaction, and even interlinking of speech and text resources using linguistic linked open data (LLOD) principles. The book also provides punctuation restoration techniques, enabling the production of high-quality text transcripts. Included algorithms have low latency and can be parallelized, thus enabling their use in interactive systems. Chapter authors are professors and scientific researchers with experience in building and using natural language processing algorithms and speech applications.