Advances in Commercial Deployment of Spoken Dialog Systems


Book Description

Advances in Commercial Deployment of Spoken Dialog Systems covers the peculiarities of commercial deployments of spoken dialog systems, from the tools, standards, and design principles to build them, the infrastructure to deploy them, techniques to monitor, evaluate, and analyze them, and, most importantly, effective strategies to adapt, tune, and optimize them. The book shows to what extent academic spoken dialog system research converges with real-world applications. This academic and practical synergy can be leveraged to build successful and robust spoken dialog applications that are useful when dealing with the dynamics of the ever-changing future user.




Natural Language Dialog Systems and Intelligent Assistants


Book Description

This book covers state-of-the-art topics on the practical implementation of Spoken Dialog Systems and intelligent assistants in everyday applications. It presents scientific achievements in language processing that result in the development of successful applications and addresses general issues regarding the advances in Spoken Dialog Systems with applications in robotics, knowledge access and communication. Emphasis is placed on the following topics: speaker/language recognition, user modeling / simulation, evaluation of dialog system, multi-modality / emotion recognition from speech, speech data mining, language resource and databases, machine learning for spoken dialog systems and educational and healthcare applications.




The Conversational Interface


Book Description

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the conversational interface, which is becoming the main mode of interaction with virtual personal assistants, smart devices, various types of wearable, and social robots. The book consists of four parts. Part I presents the background to conversational interfaces, examining past and present work on spoken language interaction with computers. Part II covers the various technologies that are required to build a conversational interface along with practical chapters and exercises using open source tools. Part III looks at interactions with smart devices, wearables, and robots, and discusses the role of emotion and personality in the conversational interface. Part IV examines methods for evaluating conversational interfaces and discusses future directions.




Advances in Audio Watermarking Based on Matrix Decomposition


Book Description

This book introduces audio watermarking methods in transform domain based on matrix decomposition for copyright protection. Chapter 1 discusses the application and properties of digital watermarking. Chapter 2 proposes a blind lifting wavelet transform (LWT) based watermarking method using fast Walsh Hadamard transform (FWHT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) for audio copyright protection. Chapter 3 presents a blind audio watermarking method based on LWT and QR decomposition (QRD) for audio copyright protection. Chapter 4 introduces an audio watermarking algorithm based on FWHT and LU decomposition (LUD). Chapter 5 proposes an audio watermarking method based on LWT and Schur decomposition (SD). Chapter 6 explains in details on the challenges and future trends of audio watermarking in various application areas. Introduces audio watermarking methods for copyright protection and ownership protection; Describes watermarking methods with encryption and decryption that provide excellent performance in terms of imperceptibility, robustness, and data payload; Discusses in details on the challenges and future research direction of audio watermarking in various application areas.




Advances in Non-Linear Modeling for Speech Processing


Book Description

Advances in Non-Linear Modeling for Speech Processing includes advanced topics in non-linear estimation and modeling techniques along with their applications to speaker recognition. Non-linear aeroacoustic modeling approach is used to estimate the important fine-structure speech events, which are not revealed by the short time Fourier transform (STFT). This aeroacostic modeling approach provides the impetus for the high resolution Teager energy operator (TEO). This operator is characterized by a time resolution that can track rapid signal energy changes within a glottal cycle. The cepstral features like linear prediction cepstral coefficients (LPCC) and mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) are computed from the magnitude spectrum of the speech frame and the phase spectra is neglected. To overcome the problem of neglecting the phase spectra, the speech production system can be represented as an amplitude modulation-frequency modulation (AM-FM) model. To demodulate the speech signal, to estimation the amplitude envelope and instantaneous frequency components, the energy separation algorithm (ESA) and the Hilbert transform demodulation (HTD) algorithm are discussed. Different features derived using above non-linear modeling techniques are used to develop a speaker identification system. Finally, it is shown that, the fusion of speech production and speech perception mechanisms can lead to a robust feature set.




Advances in Audio Watermarking Based on Singular Value Decomposition


Book Description

This book introduces audio watermarking methods for copyright protection, which has drawn extensive attention for securing digital data from unauthorized copying. The book is divided into two parts. First, an audio watermarking method in discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and discrete cosine transform (DCT) domains using singular value decomposition (SVD) and quantization is introduced. This method is robust against various attacks and provides good imperceptible watermarked sounds. Then, an audio watermarking method in fast Fourier transform (FFT) domain using SVD and Cartesian-polar transformation (CPT) is presented. This method has high imperceptibility and high data payload and it provides good robustness against various attacks. These techniques allow media owners to protect copyright and to show authenticity and ownership of their material in a variety of applications. · Features new methods of audio watermarking for copyright protection and ownership protection · Outlines techniques that provide superior performance in terms of imperceptibility, robustness, and data payload · Includes applications such as data authentication, data indexing, broadcast monitoring, fingerprinting, etc.




Advance Compression and Watermarking Technique for Speech Signals


Book Description

This book introduces methods for copyright protection and compression for speech signals. The first method introduces copyright protection of speech signal using watermarking; the second introduces compression of the speech signal using Compressive Sensing (CS). Both methods are tested and analyzed. The speech watermarking method uses technology such as Finite Ridgelet Transform (FRT), Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The performance of the method is evaluated and compared with existing watermarking methods. In the speech compression method, the standard Compressive Sensing (CS) process is used for compression of the speech signal. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using various transform bases like Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), and Fast Discrete Curvelet Transform (FDCuT).




Spoken Dialogue Technology


Book Description

Spoken Dialogue Technology provides extensive coverage of spoken dialogue systems, ranging from the theoretical underpinnings of the study of dialogue through to a detailed look at a number of well-established methods and tools for developing spoken dialogue systems. The book enables students and practitioners to design and test dialogue systems using several available development environments and languages, including the CSLU toolkit, VoiceXML, SALT, and XHTML+ voice. This practical orientation is usually available otherwise only in reference manuals supplied with software development kits. The latest research in spoken dialogue systems is presented along with extensive coverage of the most relevant theoretical issues and a critical evaluation of current research prototypes. A dedicated web site containing supplementary materials, code, links to resources will enable readers to develop and test their own systems (). Previously such materials have been difficult to track down, available only on a range of disparate web sites and this web site provides a unique and useful reference source which will prove invaluable.




Extraction of Prosody for Automatic Speaker, Language, Emotion and Speech Recognition


Book Description

This updated book expands upon prosody for recognition applications of speech processing. It includes importance of prosody for speech processing applications; builds on why prosody needs to be incorporated in speech processing applications; and presents methods for extraction and representation of prosody for applications such as speaker recognition, language recognition and speech recognition. The updated book also includes information on the significance of prosody for emotion recognition and various prosody-based approaches for automatic emotion recognition from speech.




Searching Speech Databases


Book Description

This book presents techniques for audio search, aimed to retrieve information from massive speech databases by using audio query words. The authors examine different features, techniques and evaluation measures attempted by researchers around the world. The topics covered also include available databases, software / tools, patents / copyrights, and different platforms for benchmarking. The content is relevant for developers, academics, and students.​