Copyright 2009, Toshiba Corporation.

12 January 2010

Speech Technology GroupCambridge Research LabToshiba Research Europe Ltd

Kate KnillManager, Interaction Technologykate.knill@crl.toshiba.co.uk

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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

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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 Corporate R&D Center

Toshiba China R&D CenterPeking

Toshiba China R&D CenterPeking

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 Officein Silicon ValleySan Jose

TARI Branch Officein Silicon ValleySan Jose

Toshiba America Research, Inc.Piscataway, New Jersey

Toshiba America Research, Inc.Piscataway, New Jersey

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Toshiba Cambridge Research Lab

Established 1991 –

Semiconductor Physics for the 21st Century– Quantum Information

– Nano-biotechnology

Speech Technology Group added 2002

Computer Vision Group added 2006

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Toshiba Speech and Language R&D

Toshiba China R&D, Beijing

Toshiba Corporate R&D Center, Kawasaki

Toshiba Research Europe Ltd, Cambridge

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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