Abstract: A voice acquisition system for a vehicle includes an interior rearview mirror assembly attached at an inner portion of the windshield of a vehicle equipped with the interior rearview mirror assembly. The interior rearview mirror assembly includes at least two microphones for receiving audio signals within a cabin of the vehicle and generating an output indicative of the audio signals. A control is in the vehicle and is responsive to the output from the at least one microphone. The control at least partially distinguishes vocal signals from non-vocal signals present in the output. The at least two microphones provide sound capture for at least one of a hands free cell phone system, an audio recording system and a wireless communication system.

Abstract: Techniques implemented as systems, methods, and apparatuses, including computer program products, for obfuscating sensitive content in an audio source representative of an interaction between a contact center caller and a contact center agent. The techniques include performing, by an analysis engine of a contact center system, a context-sensitive content analysis of the audio source to identify each audio source segment that includes content determined by the analysis engine to be sensitive content based on its context; and processing, by an obfuscation engine of the contact center system, one or more identified audio source segments to generate corresponding altered audio source segments each including obfuscated sensitive content.

Abstract: A voice acquisition system for a vehicle includes an interior rearview mirror assembly. The mirror assembly may include a microphone for receiving audio signals within a cabin of the vehicle and generating an output indicative of these audio signals. The microphone may provide sound capture for a hands free cell phone system, an audio recording system and/or an emergency communication system. The system may include a control that is responsive to the output from the microphone and that distinguishes vocal signals from non-vocal signals present in the output. The microphone may provide sound capture for at least one accessory of the equipped vehicle, and the accessory may be responsive to a vocal signal captured by the microphone. The interior rearview mirror assembly may include at least one accessory, such as an antenna, a video device, a security system status indicator, a tire pressure indicator display and/or a loudspeaker.

Abstract: A method for recognizing speech involves presenting an utterance to a speech recognition system and determining, via the speech recognition system, that the utterance contains a particular expression, where the particular expression is capable of being associated with at least two different meanings. The method further involves splitting the utterance into a plurality of speech frames, where each frame is assigned a predetermined time segment and a frame number, and indexing the utterance to i) a predetermined frame number, or ii) a predetermined time segment. The indexing of the utterance identifies that one of the frames includes the particular expression. Then the frame including the particular expression is re-presented to the speech recognition system to verify that the particular expression was actually recited in the utterance.

Abstract: There is provided a voice processing device. The device includes: score calculation unit configured to calculate a score indicating compatibility of a voice signal input on the basis of an utterance of a user with each of plural pieces of intention information indicating each of a plurality of intentions; intention selection unit configured to select the intention information indicating the intention of the utterance of the user among the plural pieces of intention information on the basis of the score calculated by the score calculation unit; and intention reliability calculation unit configured to calculate the reliability with respect to the intention information selected by the intention selection unit on the basis of the score calculated by the score calculation unit.

Abstract: A method of reducing noise in an audio signal, comprising the steps of: using a furrow filter to select spectral components that are narrow in frequency but relatively broad in time; using a bar filter to select spectral components that are broad in frequency but relatively narrow in time; analyzing the relative energy distribution between the output of the furrow and bar filters to determine the optimal proportion of spectral components for the output signal; and reconstructing the audio signal to generate the output signal. A second pair of time-frequency filters may be used to further improve intelligibility of the output signal. The temporal relationship between the furrow filter output and the bar filter output may be monitored so that the fricative components are allowed primarily at boundaries between intervals with no voiced signal present and intervals with voice components. A noise reduction system for an audio signal.

Abstract: According to one aspect of the invention, a speech recognizer includes: an audio data acquiring portion configured to acquire audio data via a microphone; a speech section detecting portion configured to detect a talking start time and a talking end time based on the audio data; a spoken word identifying portion configured to identify the audio in a speech section from the talking start time to the talking end time; and a noise suppressing portion configured to suppress a generation of a noise from an electrical noise source for the speech section.

Abstract: Sentence boundaries in noisy conversational transcription data are automatically identified. Noise and transcription symbols are removed, and a training set is formed with sentence boundaries marked based on long silences or on manual markings in the transcribed data. Frequencies of head and tail n-grams that occur at the beginning and ending of sentences are determined from the training set. N-grams that occur a significant number of times in the middle of sentences in relation to their occurrences at the beginning or ending of sentences are filtered out. A boundary is marked before every head n-gram and after every tail n-gram occurring in the conversational data and remaining after filtering. Turns are identified. A boundary is marked after each turn, unless the turn ends with an impermissible tail word or is an incomplete turn. The marked boundaries in the conversational data identify sentence boundaries.

Abstract: A very low bit rate communication system. In preferred embodiments, an off-the-shelf module is adapted to convert a speaker's voice to text. A processor is provided to separate the text into individual words. The processor is programmed with a dictionary which provides pre-assigned specific 14-bit numeric values to each word in the dictionary (words used more frequently may be assigned shorter codes). The processor creates a numeric stream from 14-bit numeric values and this numeric stream is then transmitted to a receiver. Typical speech contains 4 words/second, so bit rates as low as 50 bits/second may be achieved with this technique. At the receiving end, the stream of received 14-bit numeric values, representing the speaker's words, are looked up in a dictionary identical to that at the transmitting end and the text of the words reconstructed. Text-to-speech techniques common to the industry are then used to regenerate the speech.

Abstract: Provided are an apparatus and method for recognizing continuous speech using search space restriction based on phoneme recognition. In the apparatus and method, a search space can be primarily reduced by restricting connection words to be shifted at a boundary between words based on the phoneme recognition result. In addition, the search space can be secondarily reduced by rapidly calculating a degree of similarity between the connection word to be shifted and the phoneme recognition result using a phoneme code and shifting the corresponding phonemes to only connection words having degrees of similarity equal to or higher than a predetermined reference value. Therefore, the speed and performance of the speech recognition process can be improved in various speech recognition services.