Home ›

Speech I/O for Embedded Applications

Issue 206

From Issue #206
June 2011

Aug 31, 2011  By Rick Rogers
 in
Is the world ready for speech-enabled embedded devices? Now the technology is here for usable speech recognition and synthesis. See how you can use it in your own embedded applications.
From Here

We've barely scratched the surface of speech user interfaces, even for a checklist application. Depending on your embedded system, you'd have to give the user a way to start and end the checklist app, and ideally you'd have a way of signaling to the user when the app is listening. PocketSphinx prompts with “Listening...” and is supposed to terminate on saying “goodbye” (that doesn't work for me—maybe it's my Texas accent?). The source code for PocketSphinx (labeled continuous.c) comes with the package, so you can experiment with it. There are many, many optimizations you could make to both speech recognition and synthesis, using restricted vocabularies, different voice databases and just tuning the parameters.

And, what about a more general, practical speech user interface for embedded devices? The tools are available—how creative can you be?

Resources

eSpeak: espeak.sourceforge.net/index.html

Carnegie Mellon University's Sphinx Group: cmusphinx.sourceforge.net

Carnegie Mellon's Flite Page: www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite

Genesi EFIKA MX: www.genesi-usa.com/products/efika

World Health Organization Safe Surgery Checklist: www.who.int/patientsafety/safesurgery/ss_checklist/en/index.html

Rick Rogers has been a professional embedded developer for more than 30 years. Now specializing in mobile application software, when Rick isn't writing software for a living, he's writing books and magazine articles like this one. He welcomes feedback on this article at portmobileapps@gmail.com.

______________________

Rick Rogers has been a professional embedded developer for more than 30 years. Now specializing in mobile application software, when Rick isn't writing software for a living, he's writing books and magazine articles like this one.

White Paper
More Resources
Fabric-Based Computing Enables Optimized Hyperscale Data Centers

Today’s modular x86 servers are compute-centric, designed as a least common denominator to support a wide range of IT workloads. Those generic, virtualized IT workloads have much different resource optimization requirements than hyperscale and cloud applications. They have resulted in a “one size fits all” enterprise IT architecture that is not optimized for a specific set of IT workloads, and especially not emerging hyperscale workloads, such as web applications, big data, and object storage. In this report, you will learn how shifting the focus from traditional compute-centric IT architectures to an innovative disaggregated fabric-based architecture can optimize and scale your data center.

Learn More

Sponsored by AMD

White Paper
More Resources
Red Hat White Paper: Using an Open Source Framework to Catch the Bad Guy

Built-in forensics, incident response, and security with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Every security policy provides guidance and requirements for ensuring adequate protection of information and data, as well as high-level technical and administrative security requirements for a system in a given environment. Traditionally, providing security for a system focuses on the confidentiality of the information on it. However, protecting the data integrity and system and data availability is just as important. For example, when processing United States intelligence information, there are three attributes that require protection: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Learn more about catching the bad guy in this free white paper.

Learn More

Sponsored by DLT Solutions