The performance of automatic speech recognition systems(ASR) degrades in the presence of noisy speech. This paper demonstrates that using electroencephalography (EEG) can help automatic speech recognition systems overcome performance loss in the presence of noise. The paper also shows that distillation training of automatic speech recognition systems using EEG features will increase their performance. Finally, we demonstrate the ability to recognize words from EEG with no speech signal on a limited English vocabulary with high accuracy.
Form about four decades human beings have been dreaming of an intelligent machine which can master the natural speech. In its simplest form, this machine should consist of two subsystems, namely automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech understanding (SU). The goal of ASR is to transcribe natural speech while SU is to understand the meaning of the transcription. Recognizing and understanding a spoken sentence is obviously a knowledge-intensive process, which must take into account all variable information about the speech communication process, from acoustics to semantics and pragmatics. While developing an Automatic Speech Recognition System, it is observed that some adverse conditions degrade the performance of the Speech Recognition System. In this contribution, speech enhancement system is introduced for enhancing speech signals corrupted by additive noise and improving the performance of Automatic Speech Recognizers in noisy conditions. Automatic speech recognition experiments show that replacing noisy speech signals by the corresponding enhanced speech signals leads to an improvement in the recognition accuracies. The amount of improvement varies with the type of the corrupting noise.
In this paper we demonstrate end to end continuous speech recognition (CSR) using electroencephalography (EEG) signals with no speech signal as input. An attention model based automatic speech recognition (ASR) and connectionist temporal classification (CTC) based ASR systems were implemented for performing recognition. We further demonstrate CSR for noisy speech by fusing with EEG features.
In their everyday life, the speech recognition performance of human listeners is influenced by diverse factors, such as the acoustic environment, the talker and listener positions, possibly impaired hearing, and optional hearing devices. Prediction models come closer to considering all required factors simultaneously to predict the individual speech recognition performance in complex acoustic environments. While such predictions may still not be sufficiently accurate for serious applications, they can already be performed and demand an accessible representation. In this contribution, an interactive representation of speech recognition performance is proposed, which focuses on the listeners head orientation and the spatial dimensions of an acoustic scene. A exemplary modeling toolchain, including an acoustic rendering model, a hearing device model, and a listener model, was used to generate a data set for demonstration purposes. Using the spatial speech recognition maps to explore this data set demonstrated the suitability of the approach to observe possibly relevant behavior. The proposed representation provides a suitable target to compare and validate different modeling approaches in ecologically relevant contexts. Eventually, it may serve as a tool to use validated prediction models in the design of spaces and devices which take speech communication into account.
Recent success of the Tacotron speech synthesis architecture and its variants in producing natural sounding multi-speaker synthesized speech has raised the exciting possibility of replacing expensive, manually transcribed, domain-specific, human speech that is used to train speech recognizers. The multi-speaker speech synthesis architecture can learn latent embedding spaces of prosody, speaker and style variations derived from input acoustic representations thereby allowing for manipulation of the synthesized speech. In this paper, we evaluate the feasibility of enhancing speech recognition performance using speech synthesis using two corpora from different domains. We explore algorithms to provide the necessary acoustic and lexical diversity needed for robust speech recognition. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of this approach as a data augmentation strategy for domain-transfer. We find that improvements to speech recognition performance is achievable by augmenting training data with synthesized material. However, there remains a substantial gap in performance between recognizers trained on human speech those trained on synthesized speech.
Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) is an interdisciplinary application of computer science and linguistics that enable us to derive the transcription from the uttered speech waveform. It finds several applications in Military like High-performance fighter aircraft, helicopters, air-traffic controller. Other than military speech recognition is used in healthcare, persons with disabilities and many more. ASR has been an active research area. Several models and algorithms for speech to text (STT) have been proposed. One of the most recent is Mozilla Deep Speech, it is based on the Deep Speech research paper by Baidu. Deep Speech is a state-of-art speech recognition system is developed using end-to-end deep learning, it is trained using well-optimized Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) training system utilizing multiple Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). This training is mostly done using American-English accent datasets, which results in poor generalizability to other English accents. India is a land of vast diversity. This can even be seen in the speech, there are several English accents which vary from state to state. In this work, we have used transfer learning approach using most recent Deep Speech model i.e., deepspeech-0.9.3 to develop an end-to-end speech recognition system for Indian-English accents. This work utilizes fine-tuning and data argumentation to further optimize and improve the Deep Speech ASR system. Indic TTS data of Indian-English accents is used for transfer learning and fine-tuning the pre-trained Deep Speech model. A general comparison is made among the untrained model, our trained model and other available speech recognition services for Indian-English Accents.
The decade from 2010 to 2020 saw remarkable improvements in automatic speech recognition. Many people now use speech recognition on a daily basis, for example to perform voice search queries, send text messages, and interact with voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Siri by Apple. Before 2010 most people rarely used speech recognition. Given the remarkable changes in the state of speech recognition over the previous decade, what can we expect over the coming decade? I attempt to forecast the state of speech recognition research and applications by the year 2030. While the changes to general speech recognition accuracy will not be as dramatic as in the previous decade, I suggest we have an exciting decade of progress in speech technology ahead of us.
This work presents our end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) model targetting at robust speech recognition, called Integraded speech Recognition with enhanced speech Input for Self-supervised learning representation (IRIS). Compared with conventional E2E ASR models, the proposed E2E model integrates two important modules including a speech enhancement (SE) module and a self-supervised learning representation (SSLR) module. The SE module enhances the noisy speech. Then the SSLR module extracts features from enhanced speech to be used for speech recognition (ASR). To train the proposed model, we establish an efficient learning scheme. Evaluation results on the monaural CHiME-4 task show that the IRIS model achieves the best performance reported in the literature for the single-channel CHiME-4 benchmark (2.0% for the real development and 3.9% for the real test) thanks to the powerful pre-trained SSLR module and the fine-tuned SE module.
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