Revision as of 05:39, 21 September 2013

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Introduction

How to Talk to Machines

A short 1-2 day workshop introducing speech recognition and speech synthesis techniques for the creation of interactive artwork. We use pre-compiled open-source tools (CMU Sphinx ASR, Festival TTS, Processing, Python) and focus on the demonstrable strengths and unexpected limitations of speech technologies as vehicles for creating meaning.

Saturday Sept 21, 2-6pm Centro Cultural de Borges UNTREF.

Background Reading:

• If Things Can Talk, What Do They Say? If We Can Talk to Things, What Do We Say? Natalie Jeremijenko. 2005-03-05 [1]
  • also see the responses by Simon Penny, Lucy Suchmann, and Natalie linked from that page.
• Dialogue with a Monologue: Voice Chips and the Products of Abstract Speech. [2]

Automatic Speech Recognition

What is it?

Engines

• CMU Sphinx Open Source Toolkit For Speech Recognition Project by Carnegie Mellon University
• Pocketsphinx. A light-weight, portable implementatin of sphinx. pocketsphinx on win32 - http://www.aiaioo.com/cms/index.php?id=28
• Google ASR.
• Google ASR wrapped for processing - http://stt.getflourish.com/

Installing CMU Sphinx

http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/wiki/download/

Language Models

Acoustic models versus language models.

Grammars versus Satistical Language Models.

Available language models. English, Mandarin, French, Spanish, German, Dutch and more: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cmusphinx/files/Acoustic%20and%20Language%20Models/

Using sphinx

• open a terminal. Windows, Run->Cmd.
• change to the pocketsphinx directory.
  • cd Desktop\untref_speech\pocketsphinx-0.8-win32\bin\Release
• run the pocketsphinx command to recognize english:
  • pocketsphinx_continuous.exe -hmm ..\..\model\hmm\en_US\hub4wsj_sc_8k -dict ..\..\model\lm\en_US\cmu07a.dic -lm ..\..\model\lm\en_US\hub4.5000.DMP
• recognize spanish:
  • pocketsphinx_continuous.exe -hmm ..\..\model\hmm\es_MX\hub4_spanish_itesm.cd_cont_2500 -dict ..\..\model\lm\es_MX\h4.dict -lm ..\..\model\lm\es_MX\H4.arpa.Z.DMP
  • this should transcribe live from the microphone.

Training your own Models

grammer is trivial.

slm, can use online tools. or try the sphinxtrain packages.

Programming with Speech Recognition

Processing. Sphinx4, the java interface.

Python or c++, command line, android. pocketsphinx.

Text To Speech Synthesis

What is it?

Engines

• Festival/Festvox. Festival from University of Edinburgh. CMU Speech group.
• freetts. wrapper for processing - http://www.local-guru.net/blog/pages/ttslib
• MARY TTS. http://mary.dfki.de/
• Google TTS. http://amnonp5.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/text-to-speech/
• Mac OS X Built in speech synthesis
• MBROLA voices. - http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/

Test them online

• festival online demo - http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/onlinedemo.html
  • Spanish (UVIGO Spanish Male)
  • American English
  • Others...
• MARY TTS online demo - http://mary.dfki.de:59125/

Voices

• http://festvox.org/dbs/index.html
• https://github.com/joseguerrero/festival-spanish-voices
• spanish voices - http://sangonz.wordpress.com/2010/05/22/spanish-voices-for-festival/

Installing Festival

• http://festvox.org/packed/festival/2.1/festival-2.1-release.tar.gz
• windows binaries http://sourceforge.net/projects/e-guidedog/files/related%20third%20party%20software/0.3/festival-2.1-win.7z/download
• voices http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jyamagis/software/page54/page54.html

Tutorial

• http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jyamagis/misc/Practice_of_Festival_speech_synthesizer.html