Okko in Speech

Roger Ebert, who lost his lower jaw to cancer, has been his old voice back. Or at least a version of it. Edinburgh-based CereProc has build a custom voice for its own speech synthesis engine based on old recordings such as TV appearances and DVD commentary tracks.

This is of course not the first case of text-to-speech (TTS) being used for essential day-to-day communication. Most prominently, Professor Stephen Hawkins has been doing so since 1985, initially using DECTalk, since 2009 NeoSpeech. The poor quality of his voice prior to the switch was of course a bit of a trademark. The anecdote goes that Professor Hawkins stuck with his old voice out of attachment. While many speech and language technologies suffer a wow-but-who-really-needs-it existence, these cases are wonderful examples exhibiting real utility.

Mr. Ebert’s voice is novel in one regard: he got his own voice back. I have half-seriously mused in the past whether this wasn’t becoming a real option. Typically, new voice development for general purpose speech synthesis is a costly affair, mostly due to time and labor intensive data preprocessing (studio recording, annotation, hand alignment, etc.) However as the “grunt work” is getting more streamlined and automatized the buy-in costs for a new voice lowers. Mr. Ebert was “lucky” in the sense that large amounts of his voice had already been recorded in good enough quality to enable building his custom voice. Another player on the TTS market, Cepstral, has recently launched its VoiceForge offering, which aims to lower the entry threshold for home-grown TTS developers.

Another option that seems to be more and more realistic is employing “voice-morphing” and “voice transformation”. The idea here is to simply apply changes to an already existing, high-quality TTS voice. The following is a demonstration of how the latter can be done by changing purely acoustic properties (timbre, pitch, rate) of a voice signal:

Voice morphing changes one voice to another. A Cambridge University research project demonstrated how recordings of one speaker could be made to sound like that of another using relatively little training data. The following are some examples:

Original Speaker 1:

Target Speaker 2:

Converted Speaker 1 to Speaker 2:

Similar technology was also show cast extensively during the 2009 Interspeech Conference. Perhaps this will one day enable those that have lost their voice without hours (or days) of recordings of it at their disposal to have their own custom voices to talk to their loved ones.

A no-frills phone with the unlikely name of Zumba Lumba has recently received some attention by the BBC. The phone is said to be top-secret, developed by a defense-aviation company. It does without frills like a camera or an applications platform, but touts some interesting security and computational features, (not only) related to speech technology:

• Cloud computing – the phone uses no local storage for contacts, data.
• Network speech recognition – user input is recognized over the internet. This should avoid hardware intensive local computing for voice input, but requires internet access.
• Voice identification – enhanced security, because the phone will only respond to a single user’s voice.

Some seem to think this is a potential iPhone killer at least in terms of making use of innovative input modalities (though Google already released a speech recognition app for the iPhone.) Others simply thinks it’s a hoax.

Either way, the idea of joining mobile with cloud computing is interesting. Using voice identification for security has its appeal as well, even if it’s unclear whether keeping data in the cloud and sending voice data over the internet is any more secure than simply keeping data on your phone, locally.

Diligent readers may have noticed that dominant news bits concerning speech and language technologies seem to focus on the cost- or time-saving aspects it. This is understandable, as the big players (Google, Microsoft, Nuance, IBM) have made it their mandate to capture lucrative markets (call center automation, directory assistance). Application of natural language technologies elsewhere, e.g. where it’s fun (in games) or necessary (providing accessibility for visually impaired users), seems to lag.
Not so this week. This week seems to shine under the assistive/accessibility technology star. Note Sourceforge project “Speak as Daisy” – a Microsoft Word plugin that enables creation of XML files with markup for speech synthesis or electronic braille generation. The plugin is said to be available in 2008.
Mac users with need for improved document read back in British English will rejoice over the improved Infovox iVox voices.
Philips and Elsevier develop a speech-enabled diagnostic system for Radiologists.
Behold Nattiq’s USB Hal Pen, which allows blind users to use the company’s accessibility features on any computer with a USB port without installation.
Of course there’s some overlap with time-, cost- and money-saving technologies as well. The FBI has announced widespread use of Nuance Dragon Naturally Speaking dictation for report and interview transcription.
Lastly, here’s an a propos rant against call center automation and frustrated end-users, a target group for speech and language technologies all too often neglected. Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned about usability by the “money savers” employing speech technology, taken from those that rely on speech recognition and synthesis for their daily needs. I don’t know, but F-word spotting as a means for prioritizing frustrated callers seems like an acknowledgement of defeat.