Making Machines Understand Us in Reverberant Rooms

Speech recognition technology has left the research laboratory and is increasingly coming into practical use, enabling a wide spectrum of innovative and exciting voice-driven applications that are radically changing our way of accessing digital services and information. Most of today's applications still require a microphone located near the talker. However, almost all of these applications would benefit from distant-talking speech capturing, where talkers are able to speak at some distance from the microphones without the encumbrance of handheld or body-worn equipment [1]. For example, applications such as meeting speech recognition, automatic annotation of consumer-generated videos, speech-to-speech translation in teleconferencing, and hands-free interfaces for controlling consumer-products, like interactive TV, will greatly benefit from distant-talking operation. Furthermore, for a number of unexplored but important applications, distant microphones are a prerequisite. This means that distant talking speech recognition technology is essential for extending the availability of speech recognizers as well as enhancing the convenience of existing speech recognition applications. © 2012 IEEE.