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 ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The importance of Language Identification for African languages is seeing a dramatic increase due to the development of telecommunication infrastructure and, as a result, an increase in volumes of data ...

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: Spoken dialogue systems accessed over the telephone network are rapidly becoming more popular as a means to reduce call-centre costs and improve customer experience. It is now technologically feasible ...

Despite enormous advances in digital communication, the voice is still the primary tool with which people exchange ideas. However, uncompressed digital speech tends to require prohibitively high data rates (upward of ...

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 ...

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 ...

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis presents a system that is designed to replace the manual process of generating a pronunciation dictionary for use in automatic speech recognition. The proposed system has several stages. The ...