Research and development of speech technology & applications for Mexican Spanish at the Tlatoa group

Abstract

Thanks to the advances in today's technology in terms of processing speed of computers, storage space and the management of sound and video devices, speech technology is a reality in almost any kind of computerized system. Speech applications are being used in personal computers, cellular phones, etc. This makes this interesting technology accessible to almost anyone. Among it's most useful applications we can find telephone-based information services, banking and computer assisted language learning systems.There exist already a large number of commercial products that use speech interfaces, developed mainly for English, German and Japanese. That is why we at TLATOA have focused our efforts on making this technology available in the Spanish spoken in Mexico.To this effect we perform basic research in the different speech processing techniques, trying to improve the performance of speech recognition and synthesis (artificial neural networks, hidden Markov Models (HMM's), Unit Selection, etc.), as well as, the Spanish language, dialogue structure, perception and human-computer interaction approaches, for the development of speech applications.