Speech technology integration and research platform: a system study

Abstract

We present a generic speech technology integration platform for application development and research across different domains. The goal of the design is two-fold: On the application development side, the system provides an intuitive developer’s interface defined by a high level application definition language and a set of convenient speech application building tools. It allows a novice developer to rapidly deploy and modify a spoken language dialogue application. On the system research and development side, the system uses a thin, ‘broker’ layer to separate the system application programming interface from the service provider interface. It makes the system easy to incorporate new technologies and new functional components. We also use a domain independent acoustic model set to cover US English phones for general speech applications. The system grammar and lexicon engine creates grammars and lexicon dictionaries on the fly to enable a practically unrestricted vocabulary for many recognition and synthesis applications.