Automatic Acoustic Speech segmentation in Praat using cloud based ASR

Abstract

The program Praat is a versatile speech analysis program, which becomes a standard in speech/language analysis scientific community. Automatic speech segmentation has been developed and used in Praat using a plugin called EasyAlign, which requires and input text (separated sentences) and clean audio recordings with quiet pauses between the sentences to operate. In this paper, a new functions will be evaluated and implemented into Praat to improve automatic speech segmentation processes and enables to process also noisy audio recordings with no input texts available. One of them is using also our own cloud based ASR (Automatic Speech recognition) solution developed. The results of the automatic speech recognition and different audio processing (noise-gate, de-noiser, normalization) were added into the Praat system to expand the EasyAlign functionality and improve the resulted automatic speech segmentation. The graphical output of the Praat also helps to visualize the automatic speech segmentation and also automatic speech recognition results for educational and system developers subjective evaluation purposes.