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Keyword spotting (KWS) is experiencing an upswing due to the pervasiveness of small electronic devices that allow interaction with them via speech. Often, KWS systems are speaker-independent, which means that any person --user or not--…

Voice-controlled house-hold devices, like Amazon Echo or Google Home, face the problem of performing speech recognition of device-directed speech in the presence of interfering background speech, i.e., background noise and interfering…

We present a preprocessed, ready-to-use automatic speech recognition corpus, BembaSpeech, consisting over 24 hours of read speech in the Bemba language, a written but low-resourced language spoken by over 30% of the population in Zambia. To…

Text-to-speech (TTS) development for African languages such as Luganda is still limited, primarily due to the scarcity of high-quality, single-speaker recordings essential for training TTS models. Prior work has focused on utilizing the…

Speech and speaker recognition systems are employed in a variety of applications, from personal assistants to telephony surveillance and biometric authentication. The wide deployment of these systems has been made possible by the improved…

A major focus of recent research in spoken language understanding (SLU) has been on the end-to-end approach where a single model can predict intents directly from speech inputs without intermediate transcripts. However, this approach…

A key desiderata for inclusive and accessible speech recognition technology is ensuring its robust performance to children's speech. Notably, this includes the rapidly advancing neural network based end-to-end speech recognition systems.…

There are more than 2000 living languages in Africa, most of which have been bypassed by advances in language technology. Current leading LLMs exhibit strong performance on a number of the most common languages (e.g. Swahili or Yoruba), but…

Although Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have achieved human-like performance for a few languages, the majority of the world's languages do not have usable systems due to the lack of large speech datasets to train these models.…

Current speech production systems predominantly rely on large transformer models that operate as black boxes, providing little interpretability or grounding in the physical mechanisms of human speech. We address this limitation by proposing…

The hand gestures are one of the typical methods used in sign language. It is very difficult for the hearing-impaired people to communicate with the world. This project presents a solution that will not only automatically recognize the hand…

Representations of AI agents in user interfaces and robotics are predominantly White, not only in terms of facial and skin features, but also in the synthetic voices they use. In this paper we explore some unexpected challenges in the…

Sign Language is used to facilitate the communication between Deaf and non-Deaf people. It uses signs-words with basic structural elements such as handshape, parts of face, body or space, and the orientation of the fingers-palm. Sign…

We describe an architecture for implementing spoken natural language dialogue interfaces to semi-autonomous systems, in which the central idea is to transform the input speech signal through successive levels of representation corresponding…

This paper addresses the challenging scenario for the distant-talking control of a music playback device, a common portable speaker with four small loudspeakers in close proximity to one microphone. The user controls the device through…

Recent progress in text classification has been focused on high-resource languages such as English and Chinese. For low-resource languages, amongst them most African languages, the lack of well-annotated data and effective preprocessing, is…

Language models are the foundation of current neural network-based models for natural language understanding and generation. However, research on the intrinsic performance of language models on African languages has been extremely limited,…

This study focuses on recognizing Bangladeshi dialects and converting diverse Bengali accents into standardized formal Bengali speech. Dialects, often referred to as regional languages, are distinctive variations of a language spoken in a…

This paper describes the ongoing development of a conversational interaction concept that allows visually impaired users to easily create and edit text documents on mobile devices using mainly voice input. In order to verify the concept, a…

While speech recognition has seen a surge in interest and research over the last decade, most machine learning models for speech recognition either require large training datasets or lots of storage and memory. Combined with the prominence…