Phew ...
Now that we have the first post out of the way, lets get right down to
business. First, who am I? I am a member of the Sun's research lab. I am
part of the speech team where we spend our time looking at issues relating
to speech synthesis and speech recognition.
Most recently the speech team has been creating speech engines written entirely in the Java(TM) programming language. First, there is FreeTTS a speech synthesis engine written in Java, and there is Sphinx-4 - a speech recognition engine written in Java. Both of these engines have been released as open source under a BSD style license at SourceForge. FreeTTS has been available for a few years now, and is in use on a number of projects. We are moving toward an official Sphinx-4 release RSN.
In this blog I hope to keep track of some of the issues involved in writing on speech engines. Some issues that I'll probably touch on from time to time are:
- Java performance
- Improving accuracy of a recognizer
- Open source development techniques