Webinar: Inclusive Speech Technology

Join us for a webinar with Odette Scharenborg about Inclusive Speech Technology 

Wednesday, June 02 (16:00 to 17:00)

This webinar is a conjunction of TU Delft Safety & Security Institute and Campus The Hague

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is increasingly used, e.g. in emergency response centers, domestic voice assistants (e.g., Google Home), and search engines. They work (really) well for standard speakers of languages for which there is enough training data to train the systems. However, for around 98% of the languages in the world, there is not enough training data, and consequently no automatic speech recognition systems can be trained for these language. Also, ASR systems tend to not work well for speakers with an accent, young children, people with a speech impediment, and other "non-standard" speakers of the language. In this talk, Odette will first give a global explanation of what speech is and what information it contains (a lot!) and what you can do with this information (also a lot!) in a global overview of the field of speech technology. Then she will zoom in on automatic speech recognition, and focus on its limitations (e.g., why does your Google Home or Siri not always understand you?) and promises, and explain more about our new research line on inclusive and ethical automatic speech recognition, i.e., the development of ASR systems that work for everyone, irrespective of how someone speaks or the language that person speaks.

Speaker:

Odette Scharenborg, Associate Professor and Delft Technology Fellow at the Multimedia Computing Group at Delft University of Technology. She works on human speech-processing inspired automatic speech processing. She has an interest in anything and everything speech, human and automatic speech processing, non-nativeness, under-resourced languages, background noise, emotion, and combinations of these. She uses different research techniques ranging from human listening experiments, eye-tracking, EEG, and computational modelling to deep neural networks.

For more information and registration, click here

Please note that registration is not compulsory as this is an online event.

You are cordially invited to join and share this event with interested friends and colleagues.

We hope to see you there!