ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The field of topic spotting in conversational speech deals with the problem of identifying "interesting" conversations or speech extracts contained within large volumes of speech data. Typical applications ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The topic of this thesis is speaker adaptation, whereby speaker-independent speech models are adapted to more closely match individual speakers by utilising a small amount of data from the targeted ...

In this thesis we studied large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition. We considered the components necessary to realise a large-vocabulary speech recogniser and how systems such as Sphinx and HTK solved the ...

This thesis describes the design of a high performance, floating-point, standalone embedded system that is appropriate for speech and audio processing purposes. The system successfully employs the Analog Devices TigerSHARC ...

The African Speech Technology (AST) project ran from 2000 to 2004 and involved collecting speech data for five South African languages, transcribing the data and building automatic speech recognition systems in these ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In this study the phoneme labels derived from a phoneme recogniser are used for phonetic speaker recognition. The time-dependencies among phonemes are modelled by using hidden Markov models (HMMs) for ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Phoneme recognition systems typically suffer from low classification accuracy. Recognition for South African English is especially difficult, due to the variety of vastly different accent groups. This ...

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are an attractive means for companies to deliver value added services with which to improve customer satisfaction. Such ASR systems require a telephony interface to connect the ...

The Gaussian mixture model (GMM) performs very effectively in applications such as speech and speaker recognition. However, evaluation speed is greatly reduced when the GMM has a large number of mixture components. ...