Module I: Speech Technologies

Introduction: description of the field, a brief historical outline of the development of intelligent audio and speech systems and the importance of research and knowledge acquisition in this field for the Slovenian language. 

Basic characteristics of the auditory perception of different sounds and the synthesis and perception of speech in human speech communication. Representations of audio and speech signals. 

Computer processing of sound and speech signals: pre-processing, sound signal features, speech signal segmentations, sound and speech databases. 

Systems for the recognition of various sounds: recognition of environmental and animal sounds, recognition of traffic sounds, audio verification of machine operation. 

Speech recognition systems: speaker recognition and verification, isolated word and continuous speech recognition, spontaneous speech recognition. Statistical acoustic and language modeling, semantic speech analysis. 

Artificial speech: systems for speech synthesis in general, grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, prosody modeling, speech-synthesis procedures. Assessment of speech synthesis systems. 

Dialogue: automated dialogue systems in general, system configurations, dialogue management, knowledge representations, multimodality, assessment of dialogue systems.

The aim of this course is to acquaint students with the field of machine hearing and speech technologies and to introduce various algorithms, techniques, and methods to accomplish different tasks related to field of the course. 

• Lectures 
• Interactive teaching 
• Practical assignments 
• Seminar work