From science fiction to science fact: a smart-house interface using speech technology and a photo-realistic avatar

Abstract

This paper explores the problems of speech recognition in a (sometimes) noisy environment. An adaptive acoustic beamformer is proposed based on the Griffiths-Jim method and a 'hot-spot' where speech can be received within a geometric-defined boundary and rejected outside of it will be shown to give a certain amount of noise immunity and improve the signal-tonoise ratio for the second stage, which is the speech recognition engine. The recognition engine used has a limited vocabulary which gives rise to an excellent hit-rate and less training than unlimited vocabulary. The technology here has improved vastly within the last decade and it will be shown that by using a head and shoulders avatar that is both photo-realistic and with appealing personality, the experience of a speech interface is vastly enhanced. The paper will explore these technologies and investigate the convergence of many of them in the current Massey smart-office.

Evaluation of a Context-Aware Voice Interface for Ambient Assisted Living

“…VUI in domestic environments has recently gained interest in the speech-processing community as exemplified by the rising number of smart-home projects that consider Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in their design [Istrate et al 2008;Charalampos and Maglogiannis 2008;Popescu et al 2008;Badii and Boudy 2009;Hamill et al 2009;Filho and Moir 2010;Lecouteux et al 2011;Gemmeke et al 2013;Christensen et al 2013;Cristoforetti et al 2014]. However, though VUIs are frequent in close domains (e.g., smartphone) there are still important challenges to overcome before implementing VUI in the home ].…”

Sound Environment Analysis in Smart Home

“…Compared to other modalities (e.g., video cameras, RFID tags), audio technology has received little attention [4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. To the best of our knowledge, the main trends in audio technology in smart home are related to dialog systems (notably for virtual assistant/robot) and emergency and the main applications are augmented human machine interaction (e.g., voice command, conversation) and security (mainly fall detection and distress situation recognition).…”

“…However, the prototype had a limited vocabulary (yes/no dialog), was not tested with aged users and there is no mention about how the noise was taken into account. In [9], a communicative avatar was designed to interact with a person in a smart office. In this research, enhanced speech recognition is performed using beam-forming and a geometric area of recording.…”

Room-localized speech activity detection in multi-microphone smart homes

“…Given that interaction with users must be convenient and natural, and motivated by the fact that speech constitutes the primary means of human-to-human communication, voice-enabled interaction systems have been progressively entering the field. Indeed, multiple smart home projects have been focusing on voice-based interaction [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13], and a number of commercial voice assistant home devices have recently been introduced in the market [14].…”