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Almost none of the 2,000+ languages spoken in Africa have widely available automatic speech recognition systems, and the required data is also only available for a few languages. We have experimented with two techniques which may provide…
Automated Speech Recognition shows superhuman performance for adult English speech on a range of benchmarks, but disappoints when fed children's speech. This has long sat in the way of child-robot interaction. Recent evolutions in…
Computational modeling of naturalistic conversations in clinical applications has seen growing interest in the past decade. An important use-case involves child-adult interactions within the autism diagnosis and intervention domain. In this…
Despite advancements in ASR, child speech recognition remains challenging due to acoustic variability and limited annotated data. While fine-tuning adult ASR models on child speech is common, comparisons with flat-start training remain…
Voicebots have provided a new avenue for supporting the development of language skills, particularly within the context of second language learning. Voicebots, though, have largely been geared towards native adult speakers. We sought to…
Generative models are a popular choice for adult-to-adult voice conversion (VC) because of their efficient way of modelling unlabelled data. To this point their usefulness in producing children speech and in particular adult to child VC has…
Modern language models (LMs) must be trained on many orders of magnitude more words of training data than human children receive before they begin to produce useful behavior. Assessing the nature and origins of this "data gap" requires…
Self-supervised techniques for learning speech representations have been shown to develop linguistic competence from exposure to speech without the need for human labels. In order to fully realize the potential of these approaches and…
This report characterized the suitability of existing datasets for devising new Machine Learning models, decision making methods, and analysis algorithms to improve Collaborative Problem Solving and then enumerated requirements for future…
We develop automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for stories told by Afrikaans and isiXhosa preschool children. Oral narratives provide a way to assess children's language development before they learn to read. We consider a range of…
For conversational large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) tasks, up to about two thousand hours of audio is commonly used to train state of the art models. Collection of labeled conversational audio however, is prohibitively…
Speech emotion recognition (SER) has made significant strides with the advent of powerful self-supervised learning (SSL) models. However, the generalization of these models to diverse languages and emotional expressions remains a challenge.…
Speaker identity is one of the important characteristics of human speech. In voice conversion, we change the speaker identity from one to another, while keeping the linguistic content unchanged. Voice conversion involves multiple speech…
Children are one of the most under-represented groups in speech technologies, as well as one of the most vulnerable in terms of privacy. Despite this, anonymization techniques targeting this population have received little attention. In…
Modern speaker recognition system relies on abundant and balanced datasets for classification training. However, diverse defective datasets, such as partially-labelled, small-scale, and imbalanced datasets, are common in real-world…
The scarcity of large-scale classroom speech data has hindered the development of AI-driven speech models for education. Public classroom datasets remain limited, and the lack of a dedicated classroom noise corpus prevents the use of…
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have progressed significantly in their performance on adult speech data; however, transcribing child speech remains challenging due to the acoustic differences in the characteristics of child and…
The Complete Vocal Technique (CVT) is a school of singing developed in the past decades by Cathrin Sadolin et al.. CVT groups the use of the voice into so called vocal modes, namely Neutral, Curbing, Overdrive and Edge. Knowledge of the…
Infant speech perception and learning is modeled using Echo State Network classification and Reinforcement Learning. Ambient speech for the modeled infant learner is created using the speech synthesizer Vocaltractlab. An auditory system is…
The Common Voice corpus is a massively-multilingual collection of transcribed speech intended for speech technology research and development. Common Voice is designed for Automatic Speech Recognition purposes but can be useful in other…