Hello,

I'm the accessibility coordinator for the Ubuntu project. I'd like to see some progress made on the Linux speech recognition front and I think the VoxForge initiative is a great way to start. Pooling resources is the only way to go!

I see a few ways we may collaborate. For a start we could work together on GSoC projects. We have a fairly good track record with Google, having mentored about 20 projects each year from 2005. I did two myself in the accessibility field last year and will do three this year. Accessibility is such a narrow field that I feel several projects like Ubuntu, VoxForge, Orca and eSpeak should consider making a common project application to Google for 10-15 places. (btw, I realise that VoxForge is only partly about accessibility)

Several of the projects listed in your GSoC forum section would be suitable for collaboration between our projects, and certainly the voice recording client. If we distribute that with Ubuntu (in universe at least) we might see decent participation numbers. It would be great if the same application also facilitated auditing of text-to-speech output. Ubuntu 7.04 just shipped with the eSpeak TTS engine with a handful of languages, but most of them could use some work.

I would think parts of that could be recycled in the Dialog Manager GUI as well. I'm currently working on a specification for the speech recognition front-end and will post a link here once I've completed the first draft of it.

Henrik 

--- (Edited on 4/26/2007 6:33 pm [GMT-0500] by Henrik) ---

Hi Henrik,

Thanks for the post! My replies follow:

> I'd like to see some progress made on the Linux speech recognition front and I think the VoxForge initiative is a great way to start. Pooling resources is the only way to go!

I agree ... It's an enormous task, and working together can only help speed things up.

>I see a few ways we may collaborate. For a start we could work together on GSoC projects. We have a fairly good track record with Google, having mentored about 20 projects each year from 2005. 

That would be great!  As you probably know, we tried unsuccessfully to apply as a mentor organization for the Google Summer of Code.  The VoxForge project, and speech recognition on Linux in general, could benefit greatly from your experiences.

>Accessibility is such a narrow field that I feel several projects like Ubuntu, VoxForge, Orca and eSpeak should consider making a common project application to Google for 10-15 places. (btw, I realise that VoxForge is only partly about accessibility)

As states on the Ubunto Accessibility wiki: "Accessibility is cutting edge in software design".  Quality speech recognition on Linux would benefit many people.  Much of the usability issues that need to be addressed in an 'accessibility' context would also help speech recognition users generally.  So I am very keen on looking for ways we can work together.  

>Several of the projects listed in your GSoC forum section would be suitable for collaboration between our projects, and certainly the voice recording client. If we distribute that with Ubuntu (in universe at least) we might see decent participation numbers. 

That would be amazing!  VoxForge is still a young community, and any collaboration with a large and well-recognized project such as Ubunto, would go a long way to help address any hesitancy people might have in contributing their speech.

>It would be great if the same application also facilitated auditing of text-to-speech output. 

I'm not sure what you mean by this ... if you mean using speech recognition to recognize Text-to-Speech output, please note that the general rule is that speech recognition engines work best to recognize the same type of speech their acoustic models ('AM') were trained with.  Thus, if the AM was trained with 'real people' speech audio, it would not work so well with the output from a text-to-speech engine.  This post provides some further information.

>I'm currently working on a specification for the speech recognition front-end and will post a link here once I've completed the first draft of it.

If you need some help drafting, please let us know.  Otherwise I am sure the VoxForge community would be more than happy to provide feedback on your proposal.

All the best,

Ken 

--- (Edited on 4/27/2007 9:59 am [GMT-0400] by kmaclean) ---