Related papers: Hello Afrika: Speech Commands in Kinyarwanda
Conversational User Interfaces such as Voice Assistants are hugely popular. Yet they are designed to be monolingual by default, lacking support for, or sensitivity to, the bilingual dialogue experience. In this provocation paper, we…
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for African languages remains constrained by limited labeled data and the lack of systematic guidance on model selection, data scaling, and decoding strategies. Large pre-trained systems such as Whisper,…
Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) are at the forefront of advances in Natural Language Processing. One widespread use case of PLMs is "prompting" - or in-context learning - where a user provides a description of a task and some…
Speech emotion analysis is an important task which further enables several application use cases. The non-verbal sounds within speech utterances also play a pivotal role in emotion analysis in speech. Due to the widespread use of…
Code-switching, the alternation of languages within a conversation or utterance, is a common communicative phenomenon that occurs in multilingual communities across the world. This survey reviews computational approaches for code-switched…
asya is a mobile application that consists of deep learning models which analyze spectra of a human voice and do noise detection, speaker diarization, gender detection, tempo estimation, and classification of emotions using only voice. All…
Current automatic speech recognition systems struggle with modeling long speech sequences due to high quadratic complexity of Transformer-based models. Selective state space models such as Mamba has performed well on long-sequence modeling…
This research addresses the challenge of developing speech applications for zero-resource languages that lack labelled data. It specifically uses acoustic word embedding (AWE) -- fixed-dimensional representations of variable-duration speech…
People with speech and hearing impairments often rely on sign language to communicate with others but most of the general population cannot understand sign language and sign language itself is a difficult language to learn, so there is a…
It is well-known that speakers who entrain to one another have more successful conversations than those who do not. Previous research has shown that interlocutors entrain on linguistic features in both written and spoken monolingual…
Language is inherent and compulsory for human communication. Whether expressed in a written or spoken way, it ensures understanding between people of the same and different regions. With the growing awareness and effort to include more…
Processing low-resource languages, such as Kiswahili, using machine learning is difficult due to lack of adequate training data. However, such low-resource languages are still important for human communication and are already in daily use…
Conversational systems or chatbots are an example of AI-Infused Applications (AIIA). Chatbots are especially important as they are often the first interaction of clients with a business and are the entry point of a business into the AI…
Text-to-speech technology has been broadly used to help people with voice disabilities to overcome their difficulties. With text-to-speech, a person types at a keyboard, the text is synthesized, and the sound comes out through the computer…
Controlling appliances is a main part of automation. The main object of Home automation is to provide a wireless communication link of home appliances to the remote user. The main objective of this work is to make such a system which…
While we do not always use words, communicating what we want to an AI is a conversation -- with ourselves as well as with it, a recurring loop with optional steps depending on the complexity of the situation and our request. Any given…
This technical report describes the methods and results of a three-week sprint to produce deployable speech recognition models for 31 under-served languages of the Common Voice project. We outline the preprocessing steps, hyperparameter…
Voice dictation is an increasingly important text input modality. Existing systems that allow both dictation and editing-by-voice restrict their command language to flat templates invoked by trigger words. In this work, we study the…
Embedding a programming language in a QR code is a new and extremely promising opportunity, as it makes devices and objects smarter without necessarily requiring an Internet connection. In this paper, all the steps needed to translate a…
This paper introduces the concept of Language-Guided World Models (LWMs) -- probabilistic models that can simulate environments by reading texts. Agents equipped with these models provide humans with more extensive and efficient control,…