相关论文: Hello Afrika: Speech Commands in Kinyarwanda
This work introduces Zambezi Voice, an open-source multilingual speech resource for Zambian languages. It contains two collections of datasets: unlabelled audio recordings of radio news and talk shows programs (160 hours) and labelled data…
Recent years have seen an explosion in the availability of Voice User Interfaces. However, user surveys suggest that there are issues with respect to usability, and it has been hypothesised that contemporary voice-enabled systems are…
This paper proposes an agent-based approach toward a more natural interface between humans and machines. Large language models equipped with tools and the communication standard OPC UA are utilized to control machines in natural language.…
We present Speakerly, a new real-time voice-based writing assistance system that helps users with text composition across various use cases such as emails, instant messages, and notes. The user can interact with the system through…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming Natural Language Processing (NLP), but their benefits are largely absent for Africa's 2,000 low-resource languages. This paper comparatively analyzes African language coverage across six LLMs,…
Smart home technology has gained widespread adoption, facilitating effortless control of devices through voice commands. However, individuals with dysarthria, a motor speech disorder, face challenges due to the variability of their speech.…
Voice assistants increasingly rely on Speech Language Models (SpeechLMs) to interpret spoken queries and execute complex tasks, yet existing benchmarks lack domain breadth, acoustic diversity, and compositional reasoning complexity to…
Supporting voice commands in applications presents significant benefits to users. However, adding such support to existing GUI-based web apps is effort-consuming with a high learning barrier, as shown in our formative study, due to the lack…
Interactions with virtual assistants typically start with a predefined trigger phrase followed by the user command. To make interactions with the assistant more intuitive, we explore whether it is feasible to drop the requirement that users…
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a transformative force across global societies, reshaping the ways we communicate, collaborate, and make decisions. Yet, as AI systems increasingly mediate interactions between humans, questions about…
Wakeup is the primary function in voice interaction which is the mainstream scheme in man-machine interaction (HMI) applications for smart home. All devices will response if the same wake-up word is used for all devices. This will bring…
In this work, we explore the benefits of using multilingual bottleneck features (mBNF) in acoustic modelling for the automatic speech recognition of code-switched (CS) speech in African languages. The unavailability of annotated corpora in…
The advent of Internet of Things (IoT) technology has generated massive interest in voice-controlled smart homes. While many voice-controlled smart home systems are designed to understand and support widely spoken languages like English,…
This paper introduces Swivuriso, a 3000-hour multilingual speech dataset developed as part of the African Next Voices project, to support the development and benchmarking of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies in seven South…
Kenyan Sign Language (KSL) is the primary language used by the deaf community in Kenya. It is the medium of instruction from Pre-primary 1 to university among deaf learners, facilitating their education and academic achievement. Kenyan Sign…
Recent speech and audio coding standards such as 3GPP Enhanced Voice Services match the foreseeable needs and requirements in transmission of speech and audio, when using current transmission infrastructure and applications. Trends in…
Interactions with electronic devices are changing in our daily lives. The day-to-day development brings curiosity to recent technology and challenges its use. The gadgets are becoming cumbersome, and their usage frustrates a segment of…
Africa has the highest linguistic diversity in the world. On account of the importance of language to communication, and the importance of reliable, powerful and accurate machine translation models in modern inter-cultural communication,…
If today some African languages like Swahili have enough resources to develop high-performing Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, many other languages spoken on the continent are still lacking such support. For these languages, still…
Vast improvements in natural language understanding and speech recognition have paved the way for conversational interaction with computers. While conversational agents have often been used for short goal-oriented dialog, we know little…