Speech processing is the study of speech signals and the processing methods of signals. The signals are usually processed in a digital representation, so speech processing can be regarded as a special case of digital signal processing, applied to speech signals. Aspects of speech processing includes the acquisition, manipulation, storage, transfer and output of speech signals. Different speech processing tasks include speech recognition, speech synthesis, speaker diarization, speech enhancement, speaker recognition, etc.
Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers. It is also known as automatic speech recognition (ASR), computer speech recognition or speech to text (STT). It incorporates knowledge and research in the computer science, linguistics and computer engineering fields. The reverse process is speech synthesis.
Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy is an Indian-born American computer scientist and a winner of the Turing Award. He is one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence and has served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon for over 50 years. He was the founding director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He was instrumental in helping to create Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies in India, to cater to the educational needs of the low-income, gifted, rural youth. He is the chairman of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. He is the first person of Asian origin to receive the Turing Award, in 1994, known as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science, for his work in the field of artificial intelligence.
A voice-user interface (VUI) makes spoken human interaction with computers possible, using speech recognition to understand spoken commands and answer questions, and typically text to speech to play a reply. A voice command device is a device controlled with a voice user interface.
A virtual assistant (VA) is a software agent that can perform a range of tasks or services for a user based on user input such as commands or questions, including verbal ones. Such technologies often incorporate chatbot capabilities to simulate human conversation, such as via online chat, to facilitate interaction with their users. The interaction may be via text, graphical interface, or voice - as some virtual assistants are able to interpret human speech and respond via synthesized voices.
Heung-Yeung "Harry" Shum is a Chinese computer scientist. He was a doctoral student of Raj Reddy. He was the Executive Vice President of Artificial Intelligence & Research at Microsoft. He is known for his research on computer vision and computer graphics, and for the development of the search engine Bing.
Yann André LeCun is a Turing Award winning French computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professor of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and Vice-President, Chief AI Scientist at Meta.
Roberto Pieraccini is an Italian and US electrical engineer working in the field of speech recognition, natural language understanding, and spoken dialog systems. He has been an active contributor to speech language research and technology since 1981. He is currently the Chief Scientist of Uniphore, a conversational automation technology company.
Julia Hirschberg is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computational linguistics and natural language processing.
Fei-Fei Li is an American computer scientist who was born in China and is known for establishing ImageNet, the dataset that enabled rapid advances in computer vision in the 2010s.
Albert Greenberg is an American software engineer and computer scientist who is notable for his contributions to the design of operating carrier and datacenter networks as well as to advances in computer networking and cloud computing. At Microsoft, he is a Corporate Vice President and the director of development for its Microsoft Azure service, which is a cloud computing infrastructure platform that coordinates data centers around the world. In contrast to hard-wired computer networks, firms such as Microsoft are turning increasingly to software-defined networking approaches to run its cloud computing networks by managing virtual networks across "millions of servers". He oversees development of technologies that keep the network running in the cloud, so that when component failures happen, software systems pinpoint the failures and "route around the faulty components;" the technology permits data centers to be "software-defined", allowing the cloud to grow rapidly while being flexible to meet changing needs, as he explained in 2015 in eWeek magazine. His research focuses on the infrastructure of cloud services, management of enterprise networks, data center networks, and systems monitoring.
Shrikanth Narayanan is an Indian-American Professor at the University of Southern California. He is an interdisciplinary engineer-scientist with a focus on human-centered signal processing and machine intelligence with speech and spoken language processing at its core. A prolific award-winning researcher, educator, and inventor, with hundreds of publications and a number of acclaimed patents to his credit, he has pioneered several research areas including in computational speech science, speech and human language technologies, audio, music and multimedia engineering, human sensing and imaging technologies, emotions research and affective computing, behavioral signal processing, and computational media intelligence. His technical contributions cover a range of applications including in defense, security, health, education, media, and the arts. His contributions continue to impact numerous domains including in human health, national defense/intelligence, and the media arts including in using technologies that facilitate awareness and support of diversity and inclusion. His award-winning patents have contributed to the proliferation of speech technologies on the cloud and on mobile devices and in enabling novel emotion-aware artificial intelligence technologies.
Larry Paul Heck is currently the Rhesa Screven Farmer, Jr., Advanced Computing Concepts Chair, Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar, and professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His career spans many of the sub-disciplines of artificial intelligence, including conversational AI, speech recognition and speaker recognition, natural language processing, web search, online advertising and acoustics. He is probably best known for his role as the founder of the Microsoft Cortana Personal Assistant and his early work in deep learning for speech processing.
Stephen John Young is a British researcher, Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge and an entrepreneur. He is one of the pioneers of automated speech recognition and statistical spoken dialogue systems. He served as the Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge from 2009 to 2015, responsible for planning and resources. From 2015 to 2019, he held a joint appointment between his professorship at Cambridge and Apple, where he was a senior member of the Siri development team.
Yong Rui is the chief technology officer and senior vice president of Lenovo Group. He is in charge of Lenovo's technical strategy, research and development directions, and Lenovo Research, one of Lenovo's most important innovation engines.
Mari Ostendorf is a professor of electrical engineering in the area of speech and language technology and the vice provost for research at the University of Washington.
Speechmatics is a technology company based in Cambridge, England, which develops automatic speech recognition software (ASR) based on recurrent neural networks and statistical language modelling. Speechmatics was originally named Cantab Research Ltd when founded in 2006 by speech recognition specialist Dr. Tony Robinson.
Hsiao-Wuen Hon is a Taiwanese-US researcher in speech technology, and coauthor of the book Spoken Language Processing. He is Corporate Vice President of Microsoft and Chairman of Microsoft's Asia-Pacific R&D Group.
Yellow.ai, formerly known as Yellow Messenger, is an enterprise conversational AI platform founded in 2016 and headquartered in San Mateo, California. It is an artificial intelligence platform that automates conversational experiences for customers and employees. It enables businesses to deliver human-like personalized interactions in the preferred language. The platform supports more than 135 languages.
Mei-Yuh Hwang is a speech recognition researcher who works for Mobvoi in Redmond, Washington, and holds a position as affiliate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Washington.
