A complete intonation model based on quantitative target approximation is described for Yorùbá text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. This model is evaluated analytically and perceptually and compared to a fundamental frequency ...

The purpose of this paper is to address the challenges and describe step-by-step solutions faced when developing an automatic speech recognition system in multilingual societies. We give a brief statistical analysis of the ...

We investigate the performance of conventional bandwidth estimators for non- parametric kernel density estimation on a number of representative pattern-recognition tasks, to gain a better understanding of the behaviour of ...

Mismatches between application and training data greatly reduce the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. However, collecting suitable amounts of in-domain and application-specific data for training ...

Access to information and communication is one of the most important needs in any population group. It is generally challenging for people in the developing world to access information because the tools and the technologies ...

We investigate the effectiveness with which the accuracy of a prompted speech corpus can be validated when minimal additional speech resources are available, and specifically when a language model in the target language ...

We improve on a piece-wise linear model of the trajectories of Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, which are commonly used as features in Automatic Speech Recognition. For this purpose, we have created a very clean ...

We report on the development of speech-recognition systems that are able to perform accurate recognition on mediumvocabulary tasks (i.e. tasks that require distinctions between approximately 200 different terms). We are ...

In a multilingual society such as South Africa, a practical directory enquiries (DE) application should be able to serve users from various language backgrounds with information relating to names in various languages: a ...

We present progress towards automated Lecture Transcription (LT) in resource scarce environments. Our development has focused on the transcription of lectures in Afrikaans from two faculties at North-West University. A ...