Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is the science of automatically transforming spoken text into a written form.

Applications for this technology are manifold. While the original idea was to create an automatic typewriter for dictation purposes, nowadays speech recognition software can be found in many applications that ask for a natural interface:

 

  • Dictation software
  • Speech Translation Systems
  • Smart Rooms
  • Human-Robot Communication
  • Telephone help lines
  • Machine control
  • Car navigation- and entertainment systems
  • Pick-to-voice systems
  • Appliances
  • Medical systems in operating rooms

The main applications for which we develop ASR systems at our laboratory are for the use in speech translation systems, e.g. our simultaneous lecture translation system, or support of the European Parliament (in project EU-BRIDGE), smart rooms, as e.g. done in the project CHIL, or human-robot interaction, e.g. in the SFB 588 project.

We conduct research in all areas relevant for ASR:
  • acoustic pre-processing and feature extraction
  • acoustic modeling
  • language modeling
  • search

We offer both, a class in ASR, and a laboratory that teaches how to build an ASR system with our in-house speech recognition toolkit Janus Recognition Toolkit (JRTk).