A privacy apparatus adds a privacy sound into the environment, thereby confusing listeners as to which of the sounds is the real source. The privacy sound may be based on the speaker's own voice or may be based on another voice. At least one characteristic of the speaker (such as a characteristic of the speaker's speech) may be identified. The characteristic may then be used to access a database of the speaker's own voice or another's voice, and to form one or more voice streams to form the priv...

Formants, corresponding to input speech units based either on a known text or the results of a speech recognition procedure, are generated from a formant synthesizer. A frequency response is generated based on the synthesized formants. A second frequency response is generated based on a speech signal which is received and which corresponds to utterances of speech units. The synthesized formants are modified based on a comparison of the frequency response corresponding to the synthesized formants...

An improved service access and heat transfer design for passively cooled telecommunication repeater housings for use with wire transmission in the local loop outside plant is achieved by a cover, sealable to the housing's sidewall, removable to provide field replaceable, plug-in access to the repeater modules and voltage protector assemblies wherein the voltage protector assemblies can be installed and removed without first removing the repeater modules protected by those voltage protector assem...

This invention relates to a method of recognizing a speech utterance (s) available in spelled form, comprising a processing stage in which a corresponding letter sequence (r) is estimated by means of a letter speech recognition unit (2) based on Hidden Markov Models, and a second processing stage (3) in which the estimated result (r) produced by the first processing stage utilizing a statistical letter sequence model (4) and a statistical model (5) for the speech recognition unit (2) is post-pro...

A new iterative hierarchical linear regression method for generating a set of linear transforms to adapt HMM speech models to a new environment for improved speech recognition is disclosed. The method determines a new set of linear transforms at an iterative step by Estimate-Maximize (EM) estimation, and then combines the new set of linear transforms with the prior set of linear transforms to form a new merged set of linear transforms. An iterative step may include realignment of adaptation spee...

The present invention generates a task-dependent acoustic model from a supervised task-independent corpus and further adapted it with an unsupervised task dependent corpus. The task-independent corpus includes task-independent training data which has an acoustic representation of words and a sequence of transcribed words corresponding to the acoustic representation. A relevance measure is defined for each of the words in the task-independent data. The relevance measure is used to weight the data...

In a speech recognition platform, a masking unit 17 can be utilized to mask noisy content within an audio sample. By masking such noise in a dynamic but predictable manner, valid content can be preserved while largely overcoming the random and detrimental presence of noise. In one embodiment, speech recognition features are extracted pursuant to a hierarchical process that localizes, at least to some extent, some of the resultant features from other resultant features. As a result, noisy or othe...

In a method for determining speech quality using an objective measure, in order to enhance prediction reliability of the evaluated quality parameters, distortions of the mean spectral envelope are extensively corrected with a weighting function W.sub.T(f) before comparing spectral properties. Additionally, the fixed band limits for integration of spectral power density are suppressed and other band limits are searched for instead in a predetermined optimization area in which the resulting spectr...

A method for a guided natural language interface includes inputting to a thin client a query, communicating to an interface intermediary, communicating to an interface descriptor data source, generating an interface descriptor, communicating the interface descriptor to the interface intermediary, communicating the interface descriptor to a parser farm, requesting an appropriate parser corresponding to the interface descriptor, assigning an appropriate parser, parsing, communicating a translation...

The present invention relates to a device and process for the digital coding and decoding of speech comprising a short term prediction, a long term prediction and a residual wave coding technique using a synthesis analysis method. The LTP analysis module uses a dictionary of delays having a pseudo-logarithmic structure, in which the delays are arranged in increasing order. This dictionary is constituted by segments, each having a given resolution, the resolutions of the successive segments decre...