Copyright 2009, Toshiba Corporation. 12 January 2010 Speech Technology Group Cambridge Research Lab Toshiba Research Europe Ltd Kate Knill Manager, Interaction Technology

2 Toshiba World leader in high technology 3 key areas: –Digital media –Electronic devices and components –Social infrastructure systems 197,000 employees worldwide Sales over US$70billion Strong ecological commitment

3 Toshiba R&D: Toward the Innovation Driven Company Subline und Fliesstexte in Helvetica Neue 24 Light Ein Aufzählungszeichen ist auch möglich Toshiba Corporate R&D Center Toshiba China R&D Center Peking Toshiba China R&D Center Peking Toshiba Research Europe Limited ◆ Cambridge Research Laboratory (CRL) ◆ Telecommunications Research Laboratory Bristol Toshiba Research Europe Limited ◆ Cambridge Research Laboratory (CRL) ◆ Telecommunications Research Laboratory Bristol TARI Branch Office in Silicon Valley San Jose TARI Branch Office in Silicon Valley San Jose Toshiba America Research, Inc. Piscataway, New Jersey Toshiba America Research, Inc. Piscataway, New Jersey

4 Toshiba Cambridge Research Lab Established 1991 – Semiconductor Physics for the 21 st Century –Quantum Information –Nano-biotechnology Speech Technology Group added 2002 Computer Vision Group added 2006

5 Toshiba Speech and Language R&D Toshiba China R&D, Beijing Toshiba Corporate R&D Center, Kawasaki Toshiba Research Europe Ltd, Cambridge

6 CRL Speech Technology Group Toshiba China R&D, Beijing Toshiba Corporate R&D Center, Kawasaki Focus on embedded ASR and TTS –Core technology research and development Noise and speaker robustness LVCSR HMM-TTS –European and North American languages Approx 15 researchers –Multinational team –Mix of engineers, computer scientists and linguists

7 Vision of Toshiba Speech Research Enhance the human-machine interface  Interact with devices how, when and where you want Create a paradigm shift  Input/output  communication

8 Speech Recognition Challenges Speaker Robustness Noise Robustness Task Robustness Current ASR engines still suffer from lack of robustness –Major limitation in deploying speech recognition systems

9 Text-to-Speech Synthesis Challenges Increase in naturalness of synthesis –Same or even smaller footprint! Increase in voice variety –Faster, cheaper addition –Non-professional voices neutral friendly expressive emotional large corpus professional voice small corpus professional voice small corpus amateur voices

10 Toshiba in SCALE: Second Supervisor Recognition –Kate Knill –KK Chin Projects: –RS-3 Hierarchical Trajectory Models for Speech Recognition, Heyun Huang, Lou Boves –AHSR-2 Data Association Multisource Acoustic Models, Liang Lu, Steve Renals Synthesis –Heiga Zen –Projects: RS-1 Trajectory HMMs for Reactive Speech Synthesis, Cassia Valentini, Simon King RS-4 Speech Synthesis by Analysis, Mauro Nicalao, Roger Moore

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