http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/hcopy-waveform-input Hi, http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/hcopy-waveform-input Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:02:32 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/volume-levelling OK I made a mistake. http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/volume-levelling Fri, 23 Sep 2011 09:26:41 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/voip-telephone-speech-audio Emailed offer to help: http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/voip-telephone-speech-audio Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:36:55 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/the-word-the All, http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/the-word-the Thu, 14 Jul 2011 14:27:47 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/gsoc-2011--simon-project-to-help-collect-speech-for-voxforge-accepted Great news: Ahel's project Google Summer of Code proposal got accepted! http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/gsoc-2011--simon-project-to-help-collect-speech-for-voxforge-accepted Mon, 25 Apr 2011 21:47:46 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/gsoc-2011---student-showing-interest-in-a-simon-project-to-help-collect-speech-for-voxforge Ahel asks: http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/gsoc-2011---student-showing-interest-in-a-simon-project-to-help-collect-speech-for-voxforge Fri, 15 Apr 2011 19:27:17 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/warning--2330-updatevars Hi all! http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/warning--2330-updatevars Tue, 21 Dec 2010 20:54:22 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/expanding-dictionary All, http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/expanding-dictionary Thu, 04 Nov 2010 15:10:57 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/audio-segmentation-problem http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/audio-segmentation-problem Thu, 12 Aug 2010 07:13:51 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/rosetta-projects-parallel-speech-corpus-project From the The Rosetta Project home page: http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/rosetta-projects-parallel-speech-corpus-project Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:26:22 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/dynamic-prompt-creation Hi everybody. http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/dynamic-prompt-creation Sat, 24 Jul 2010 06:47:14 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/regarding-adding-words-in-the-voxforge-dictionary Email thread from bharathi: http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/regarding-adding-words-in-the-voxforge-dictionary Tue, 29 Jun 2010 14:10:40 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/converting-copyright-free-texts-to-modern-spelling Hi all, Using copyright free texts from for instance the Gutenberg project poses some problems, because these texts are typically 100 years old or older (after all, in many countries copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author). So if you use these texts to record speech, you potentially end up with many words that are not present in a modern dictionary or in a pronunciation dictionary. I am not talking about words that are simply not used often any more in modern language. In some languages, the spelling of words has changed quite systematically. For instance in German many instances of "th" have been replaced by "t"; in Dutch many double vowels such as "oo" are now spelt as "o" (but not all). Adding the old-fashionedly spelt words to the dictionary would not -- in my view -- make a lot of sense. That way one would end up with a very bloated dictionary, possibly being 50% or so larger than it could be. It would be a far nicer solution if we could convert an old text in a relatively efficient manner into modern spelling. That way, it would also be possible -- as a bonus -- to use such texts to create language models with (in combination with other texts in modern spelling). If one would do that without converting the text into modern spelling, you would end up with a speech recognition system suggesting to use old spelling quite often. Not something one should want in my opinion. Of course one solution would be to use an existing spellchecker, but I don't know if that would be successful, especially for shorter words. Also, I think that it should be possible to come up with a more efficient solution. Perhaps a type of spellchecker that would remember replacements for future documents, so one could convert one old-fashioned text and the second one would go a lot faster... Does anyone have a good idea? http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/converting-copyright-free-texts-to-modern-spelling Sat, 08 May 2010 03:56:05 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/why-is-there-so-much-speech-sitting-in-the-waiting-list I thought that once it was rated, it would be incorporated. Is nobody rating speech? Or am I incorrect about how this works? http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/why-is-there-so-much-speech-sitting-in-the-waiting-list Mon, 03 May 2010 11:50:07 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/problem-with-my-rs I'm posting this on Voxforge since the issue might be with me, HTK, Julius or elsewhere. Here's what happens : In my speaker-dependent grammar I have about 8 sentences (of about 100) that start with WORD and have a second part QUIT, STATUS, TIME, etc. Seven of the eight are recognized perfectly 100% of the time and one of them WORD RESTART bombs out with "hypothesis stack exhausted" at least 50% of the time. Julius never thinks it is something else, it just runs out of suggestions. Recognition of the grammar as a whole is very close to 100%. Now it gets strange. If my prompt is WORD RESTART and I say WORD ESTART or WORD START (neither of these is in my grammar) then it returns WORD RESTART 100% right all the time. It seems something is happening to my Rs. I also have a problem occasionally with ZERO and ROMEO. I'm trying to develop a theory/hypothesis list. 1. I am not saying R at all even though I think I am (some French rolling Rs might come in handy). I don't think I am saying W. 2. My mike (bluetooth) is not hearing R even though I am saying it 3. The recording tries to decipher the R but it gets mixed in with background noise 4. It is recorded but HTK misses it 5. HTK gets it but Julius misses it. Does R already have a rap sheet? Any suggestions how I can narrow this down? I have the workaround, just omit the R while enunciating, but it would be good to have an explanation here. It's pretty hard to design a sensible grammar constantly trying to avoid Rs. http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/problem-with-my-rs Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:09:14 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/voxforge-updater-iphone-app-screen-shot Hey everyone, http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/voxforge-updater-iphone-app-screen-shot Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:21:51 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/ive-written-a-voxforge-updater-for-iphone---devs-a-couple-questions Hey VoxForge Devs, http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/ive-written-a-voxforge-updater-for-iphone---devs-a-couple-questions Thu, 24 Dec 2009 22:58:09 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/karaoke http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/karaoke Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:10:49 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/text-in-the-applets Hi, http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/text-in-the-applets Wed, 09 Dec 2009 12:38:54 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/htk-error-6213 Just ran into this problem in step 5 (Coding the audio data): http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/htk-error-6213 Thu, 03 Dec 2009 11:29:32 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/reading-samples email from Mike: http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/reading-samples Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:25:41 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/manual-vs-assisted-transcription-of-prepared-and-spontaneous-speech Came across this paper: Manual vs assisted transcription of prepared and spontaneous speech which talks about : http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/manual-vs-assisted-transcription-of-prepared-and-spontaneous-speech Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:18:37 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/thinking-about-writing-a-voxforge-iphone-app Hey VoxForge, http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/thinking-about-writing-a-voxforge-iphone-app Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:04:01 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/prompt-request Could we please have a prompt saying http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/prompt-request Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:21:00 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/warning--2331-and-warning--7324 Hi Ken and All, Thanks for all the helpful hints in the forums. I could solve quite some errors but it seems I don't know what to do about this one. [By now I've been trice through the process of building a single-word (10 only) speech recogniser with HTK using the HTK Book and the Voxforge Tutorial. The first time my recognition results were 100% but even when running the recogniser offline it only recognised two of these ten words even when different waves were loaded that did not contain these two words. Anyhow, I felt there was something wrong so I started over again and again.] This time, in step 7 of the Voxforge Tutorial, when executing the following: laptop:~$ HERest -C config -I phones0.mlf -t 250.0 150.0 1000.0 -S train.scp -H hmm5/macros -H hmm5/hmmdefs -M hmm6 monophones1 I get this warning: Pruning-On[250.0 150.0 1000.0] WARNING [-2331] UpdateModels: sp[20] copied: only 0 egs in HERest I'm not sure how serious it is and whether I should ignore or solve it. Does anyone know what the solution might be? I have a single-word grammar with ten words. These ten words are trained with 345 wav-files containing one word each. It seems quite problematic if "0 egs" out of 345 wav-files can be processed. I converted my files from 44100Hz to 16000Hz, because I read that for the SOURCERATE to be 625.0 16KHz is the right sampling rate. Now earlier, when executing HCopy -T 1 -C config -S codetr.scp to create the *.mfc's I used the configuration parameter TARGETKIND = MFCC_0_D_A, although the HTK Tutorial suggests to use TARGETKIND = MFCC_0 in step 5 of the HTK Tutorial. However, when using TARGETKIND = MFCC_0 and one step further executing: HERest -C config -I phones0.mlf -t 250.0 150.0 1000.0 -S train.scp -H hmm0/macros -H hmm0/hmmdefs -M hmm1 monophones0 almost all of my wav-files got the following error: WARNING [-7324] StepBack: File /*.mfc - bad data or over pruning in HERest So in general, there is something wrong with my wav-files. Are they too short (min = 0.43sec, max = 1.66sec, usually 0.8sec)? I'd appreciate any help I can get! Cheers. http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/warning--2331-and-warning--7324 Sun, 06 Sep 2009 20:20:35 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/extracting-mfcc Hi everyone, http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/extracting-mfcc Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:00:59 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/medical-technical-language-voice-files Greetings While working on open source programming I came across your interesting project. I am be happy to contribute my Midwest US Iowa voice. I ask if the current focus of VoxForge for Desktop Command and Control includes or will include medical transcription. Perhaps it is not time for this yet. What is the relative value to VoxForge of:? 1). Open source simulated medical text files ie office visit, history, physical, surgery, disability, radiology, and laboratory reports. 2). Reading of a dictionary list of terms. 3). Reading of a medical term in context in a phrase. 3). Philips dss/dss2 to wav, Dictaphone digital hand mike computer unit, vDictate hand mike recordings of the same material. 4). Male Female reading the same material. I hope I am not being too ambitious here as much may depend on my wife, my transcriptionits, legal advice and cooperation from the influenza virus. Best Wishes paradocs http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/medical-technical-language-voice-files Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:38:12 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/how-to-decode-adapted-model http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/how-to-decode-adapted-model Sun, 28 Jun 2009 04:25:05 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/bw-program hi to every one http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/bw-program Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:51:41 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/problem-with-bw http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/problem-with-bw Fri, 26 Jun 2009 09:46:42 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/i-have-question-about-audio-samples http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/i-have-question-about-audio-samples Mon, 22 Jun 2009 12:10:54 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/unsupervised-speaker-adaptation-using-sphinx3 Hi, http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/unsupervised-speaker-adaptation-using-sphinx3 Wed, 27 May 2009 08:11:06 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/corpus-rating-proposal Hi http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/corpus-rating-proposal Thu, 12 Mar 2009 13:38:08 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/testing-corpus-suggestion Hi, http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/testing-corpus-suggestion Wed, 11 Mar 2009 03:57:07 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/missing-prompts While I was trying to synchronize my testing set with the one used in the Sphinx experiments http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/missing-prompts Thu, 26 Feb 2009 04:35:40 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/transcribed-podcast There are over 40 hours of MP3 audio with transcription here: http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/transcribed-podcast Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:48:42 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/downsampling-to-16-khz Hello, http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/downsampling-to-16-khz Fri, 30 Jan 2009 07:35:48 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/whispering-vocals Hello Forum. I am interested in finding some vocals of female whispering. If anyone happens to come across any in this database, if you would be so kind as to post them, i would be extremely grateful. http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/whispering-vocals Fri, 05 Dec 2008 18:08:34 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/multiple-pronunciations-and-automated-audio-segmentation-using-forced-alignment I was trying out the forced alignment using HTK as described in the "Automated Audio Segmentation Using Forced Alignment" document. Everything worked great, except that I noticed that the VoxForge dictionary has multiple pronunciations for many words using a (2) suffix on the word. When running this process, the dictionary created for doing the forced alignment uses only the first pronunciations. Is that intended, or is there a mismatch here in the lexicon format that HTK expects? http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/multiple-pronunciations-and-automated-audio-segmentation-using-forced-alignment Sun, 16 Nov 2008 02:16:26 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/untitled ^ http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/untitled Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:22:04 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/my-java-application-please-enter-and-test Hi folks, http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/my-java-application-please-enter-and-test Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:43:36 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/incompatible-mfcc_e_d_n_z-for-coding I can't use targetkind MFCC_E_D_N_Z,, I always get error like: http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/incompatible-mfcc_e_d_n_z-for-coding Sat, 25 Oct 2008 19:59:58 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/downsampling-and-interpolation I have audio files recorded at 44100 Hz, and I want to downsample them to 16000 Hz. I wrote a downsampler function that simply takes the factor of the original / desired and creates a new byte array of that size, and grabs the byte values using that factor as a jumping point. http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/downsampling-and-interpolation Mon, 22 Sep 2008 10:21:31 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/number-of-code-lines Hi everybody, http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/number-of-code-lines Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:47:10 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/computer-audio-recording-advices-and-guidance http://computer-audio-recording.blogspot.com/ Great ideas on how to approach computer audio recording from the professional recording engineer view. http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/computer-audio-recording-advices-and-guidance Tue, 09 Sep 2008 10:22:37 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/julian/julius-recognizes-phrases-that-are-not-in-gramar Hi everyone! First of all, I would like to show you a simple grammar and vocabulary that we constructed at my University. grammar: http://www.lia.ufc.br/~jeffersoncarvalho/out/to_be.grammar vocabulary: http://www.lia.ufc.br/~jeffersoncarvalho/out/to_be.voca It should recognize phrases for "to be" verbs in present tense. The problem is that sometimes a phrase that is not possible to construct by the grammar is recognized. For example, julian console shows that "pass1_best: <s> ARE YOUNG AT" was recognized. But according to my grammar (I think) this is not possible. The only way to such phrase be recognized is with the following rule: S: NS_B GRAMMATICAL_CONSTRUCTION PREPOSITION NS_E But this rule doesn't exists in my grammar. The question is: does julian recognizes other phrases that are not in my grammar? Or does it recognize subsets of my grammar too? Thank you very much. http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/julian/julius-recognizes-phrases-that-are-not-in-gramar Fri, 29 Aug 2008 11:13:27 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/voxforge-under-windows-vista Hi everyone, I am having some problems runnig julian.exe under Vista. The recognizer is too slow and it sometimes freezes my application. Is someone here using any version of VoxForge under Vista? http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/voxforge-under-windows-vista Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:36:44 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/pycon-transcription http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/pycon-transcription Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:06:56 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/submission-validation http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/submission-validation Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:17:18 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/sources-forum Hi Gang, I just started looking into speech recognition about 24 hours ago, so forgive my newness. I have seen a few threads here and there talking about different places to get text and speach (like dvd subs and closed caption) but I bet the idea will come up again as the current posts age. How about a new forum dedicated to sources? I think the topic is 'seperate' enough to isolate it from the other topics (like for skimming and searching) and would make the "has this been discuessed" and "has this angle been mentioned" questions easier to answer. I have a few thoughts: kariokie (both in bars and at home, which includes the recient RockStar explosion), speach training, tapping into existing streams (the weekly reading to children at the local library) reading bible passages. IVR systems that sample a stranger's voice, analyze it, confirm the hit ("please speak your address","8345 Newland Av" "did you say eighty-three fourty-five Newland Avenue?" "yes") Call centers: 100's of people reading text from a screen. Cleaned up dictations: audio -> text, human cleans up the text, submit the pair. Are court transcriptions public? Some of these sources may be 'noisy' which might poisen the database if shoveled in whilly nilly.. I have a different thread for that. http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/sources-forum Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:33:06 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/speach-submission-app I was thinking that it would be nice (for people with disabilities like dislectsia) if there was an option to have the submission app read you the prompt if you have trouble reading it. Is this kind of thing possible in Java? http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/speach-submission-app Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:02:14 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/questioning-the-general-view-that-there-is-no-data-like-more-data In this paper: IN SEARCH OF OPTIMAL DATA SELECTION FOR TRAINING OF AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION SYSTEMS, by Nagórski, Boves and Steeneken, the authors discuss approaches to optimal data selection for training ASR systems, from the introduction: In speech recognition research the general view is that ‘there is no data like more data’. However, this may not always be true. Research in the ESPRIT Project SAM has shown that clever use of a small data set can be more efficient in training and testing isolated word ASR systems than large databases... Therefore, there seems to be room for a fundamental reassessment of the claim that more data is always better, no matter what. The paper then goes on to describe their approaches to "optimal selection of speech data from a database for efficient training of ASR systems". Although this paper is talking about *isolated* word recognition, presumably this principle would also extend to *continuous* word recognition (which is what we are interested in...). Therefore, this would indicate the importance of having some way to allow the community to be able to make edits to the text of the VoxForge corpus, and have the ability to flag submissions for removal, so as to help improve recognition results. http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/questioning-the-general-view-that-there-is-no-data-like-more-data Fri, 30 May 2008 12:03:07 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/sequitur-g2p Sequitur G2P is a GPL, trainable Grapheme-to-Phoneme converter (i.e. automatically figures out the pronunciation of new words that are not in your pronunciation dictionary). From their web site: Sequitur G2P is a data-driven grapheme-to-phoneme converter developed at RWTH Aachen University - Department of Computer Science by Maximilian Bisani. The method used in this software is described inM. Bisani and H. Ney: "Joint-Sequence Models for Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion". Submitted for publication in Speech CommunicationAnyone used this software or familiar with the approach? How is this different (if at all) from rule-based TTS Text-to-phoneme approaches (using Festival or ESpeak)? thanks, Ken http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/sequitur-g2p Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:31:02 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/harnessing-the-self-interest-of-those-training-speaker-dependent-models Just a thought: I was reading the information about speaker dependent and speaker independent models on: http://www.voxforge.org/home/dev and it occurred to me that people who want to train the model to better recognise their voices are prime donators. If an interface collects the necessary samples to train the model to an individual's voice, the hard part is already done and a large number would likely submit the samples if asked. I realise that this isn't immediately useful, but in the future, the idea is that speech-recognition/desktop-control applications will be derived from this project. A person installing a speech-recognition program is likely to expect to spend a decent amount of time (10 minutes? 30?) training it to their voice. It would be worth keeping in mind that we want to collect the raw audio in a useful format and ask the user to submit that to Voxforge http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/harnessing-the-self-interest-of-those-training-speaker-dependent-models Thu, 10 Apr 2008 04:33:03 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/using-alternate-lexicons I have successfully used the tutorial and howto with a couple of grammars now, and got thinking about alternate lexicons. The HTKBook mentions a list called BEEP which might be more suitable for my speech patterns given that the source is UK, so I downloaded the list and aborbed it into my database. I see that there are differences, including the fact that some of the phonemes are different, the voxforge lexicon knows about 'el' and 'en' but BEEP does not, and BEEP knows about 'ea', 'ia', 'oh', and 'ua' which are foreign to the voxforge list. My question is whether there are any gotchas to look out for in using "foreign" lexicons with the processes admirably laid out by voxforge processes? I'm only using my own voice for specialist grammars right now, and building from scratch. http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/using-alternate-lexicons Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:21:43 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/recognizing-the-word-computer In an earlier thread Ken noted that there was an issue with the word computer since there is an unrecognized triphone involved. I have now tripped over this stone myself, and am a bit puzzled. Computer is in the lexicon, and I have created my own audio samples (72 samples with a good sprinkling of out of vocabulary material) with the intention that the grammar will respond to my own voice. But step 4 still complains that 'computer' is not in the dictionary, even though it is in the lexicon, which I guess is different. Can anyone suggest what link I am missing here? http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/recognizing-the-word-computer Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:06:38 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/designing-grammars Has any work been done on manipulating grammars and prompt lists with databases? Seems like an ideal environment in which to test phonetic balance, adequate coverage of words in prompts, suggesting extra words to improve phonetic balance, etc. http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/designing-grammars Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:25:02 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/playback-of-recorded-prompts-fails A new Dutch 'submitter' tried to playback the prompts he recorded using the Java submission app. He got this error: unable to open the line: javax.sound.sampled.LineUnavailableException: Audio Device Unavailable He posted a screenshot here: http://forum.ubuntu-nl.org/message/209808#p209808 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/playback-of-recorded-prompts-fails Fri, 15 Feb 2008 11:11:26 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/dvd-closed-captioning-as-a-source-of-speech email from bilal ghalib: Hey guys! What a sweet project you have, I actually stumbled across it while trying to see if someone has already implemented an idea I had. I'll suggest this to you: DVD closed captioning, I have found a method to extract it and the times they happen and use this along with audio extracted 9000 hours of DVD audio/text is extracted each year, you not only get text/speech correlation, you get the times as well. What do you say? http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/dvd-closed-captioning-as-a-source-of-speech Mon, 04 Feb 2008 12:31:10 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/read-the-same-things Is having the same text read by two people more or less useful than having recordings of two independent texts of similar complexity and length? http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/read-the-same-things Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:05:03 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/acoustic-model-for-mobile-devices Hi all! I have just started with that of SR. I was thinking of programing (sphinx) a small demo app for a pda or so. At this point I wonder why are there no acoustic samples for such situations?? The less the noise present in the samples the better the recognition results or it's advisable to include audio with 'normal' (for the target situation) ??? Thanks!! http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/acoustic-model-for-mobile-devices Tue, 27 Nov 2007 04:47:19 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/new-speech-submission-application-is-live The new Speech Submission Application (Java applet) is now live. Users no longer need to register with VoxForge to contribute speech. You just need a current version of the Java Run-time Environment (1.5 or 1.6) on your computer. Instructions for installing Java are provided in the Java Troubleshooting Guide. If you have Java installed, the Java Run-time Environment on your http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/new-speech-submission-application-is-live Fri, 12 Oct 2007 08:55:45 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/dc-offset-is-what-can-cause-background-hum-in-your-recordings MojoMove Voxcast #1 contains an excellent discussion (by Ticktockman and Robert) on DC Offset in your recordings: what it is and how to remove it. You can see the effect of DC Offset when you are recording audio, and the waveform is not correctly centered around the mid point line in an Audacity track (i.e. the zero volt axis). It usually manifests itself as a low rumbling sound in the recording. This can become a big problem if you don't record with a high enough level, and then try to normalize the audio to make the speech louder - because the rumbling noise also gets louder and can drown out your speech. Although VoxForge prefers audio submissions without any noise reduction (in order to get speech from as many different "natural environments" as possible), we will gladly accept any transcribed speech recordings. thanks, Ken http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/dc-offset-is-what-can-cause-background-hum-in-your-recordings Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:36:01 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/microphone-questions Cross posted from http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/microphone-questions Mon, 24 Sep 2007 12:18:12 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/flash-recorder Hi Webmaster, Voxforge rocks!!! We have put up a flash based recorder on our website. To see it, please go to http://emandi.mla.iitk.ac.in:9000/kisanblog/loudblog/index.php and enter guest/guest as login/password You can then record files in the flash recorder. As has been previously discussed on these forums, the voxforge project needs something like that. I offer to provide you with the source code and integrate it into the voxforge site. Please contact me at abhishek[dot]singh[at]simmortel[dot]com Cheers! Abhishek. http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/flash-recorder Sun, 23 Sep 2007 01:03:08 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/free-long-distance-for-telephone-speech-submission Found a site that provides fee long-distance calls called ViaTalk Free Connect in the US. The give you 10 minutes of free long-distance talk time. I've posted this information on the Telephone Speech Submission howto. Does anyone know of any other similar services in the US or elsewhere? thanks, Ken http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/free-long-distance-for-telephone-speech-submission Tue, 18 Sep 2007 10:05:37 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/windows-vs-linux-audio-quality-differences Cross-posted from a post by ralfherzog (in the submissions forum): http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/windows-vs-linux-audio-quality-differences Fri, 17 Aug 2007 07:08:01 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/pci-sound-card-recommendations This is a cross post from the Downloads forum (see this link). Ralph was looking for recommendations for PCI sound cards: http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/pci-sound-card-recommendations Mon, 13 Aug 2007 09:28:41 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/speech-recognition-on-mpeg/audio-encoded-files The approach VoxForge has taken in processing LibriVox audiobooks is to ask LibriVox users to submit their wav files to VoxForge before they compress them to mp3 format (see the uploads page). We've also done some tests to convert mp3 speech files to wav format and training acoustic models from the wav files, and the results look promising (see the Convert Audio to MP3 and Compare Results with Original Wav link). I recently found a patent that trains acoustic models using mp3 audio directly (i.e. there is no requirement for conversion to an intermediate wav file before training acoustic models from the mp3 audio). They showed a novel(?) way of indexing videos by training acoustic models be using mp3 audio track on a video (not sure how they filter out music or other non-speech noise...). They used the HTK toolkit for this approach. Here is the abstract of the patent: http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/speech-recognition-on-mpeg/audio-encoded-files Tue, 17 Jul 2007 19:15:10 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/you-can-now-submit-speech-to-voxforge-using-your-telephone Just go to this link: Submit Speech Using Your Telephone, http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/you-can-now-submit-speech-to-voxforge-using-your-telephone Wed, 25 Apr 2007 14:00:02 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/errors-in-voxforge-corpus In the process of training Sphinx4, I'm finding there are some errors in the corpus. I've encountered one or more of the following errors: 1) Prompt doesn't match recording 2) Prompt has incorrect recording label 3) Prompt file named transcripts.txt 4) Prompt has a typo 5) Recording is unintelligible I'm wondering if and how I should report these findings and if they will be corrected in the repository. For #3 above, I'm wondering if there is some standard. In addition to the name of the prompts file, some prompts are all uppercase while some are mixed, some have recording labels pointing to the mfc directory while most are relative paths to the wav file. Some prompts have punctuation while some don't. Some prompts have multiple sentence fragments, while most are single sentences or a series of words. Thanks. http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/errors-in-voxforge-corpus Thu, 12 Apr 2007 22:24:59 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/automatic-segmentation-of-librivox-audio email from David Gelbart: http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/automatic-segmentation-of-librivox-audio Fri, 02 Mar 2007 15:05:21 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/mp3-podcast-audio-as-a-corpus-audio-source Email sent to Udhyakumar Nallasamy: Hi Udhyakumar, http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/mp3-podcast-audio-as-a-corpus-audio-source Tue, 13 Feb 2007 14:14:56 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/more-on-collecting-speech-audio-for-free-gpl-speech-corpus My email to Joe Picone, ISIP (Institute for Signal and Information Processing) http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/more-on-collecting-speech-audio-for-free-gpl-speech-corpus Tue, 13 Feb 2007 09:47:45 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/comments-on-a-good-acoustic-model-needs-to-be-trained-with-speech-recorded-in-the-environment-it-is-targeted-to-recognize Creating a new thread from comments made by David Gelbart in another thread: http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/comments-on-a-good-acoustic-model-needs-to-be-trained-with-speech-recorded-in-the-environment-it-is-targeted-to-recognize Thu, 08 Feb 2007 21:06:51 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/-what-are-best-practices-for-collecting-speech-for-a-free-gpl-speech-corpus This is taken from a post I made to the comp.speech.research newsgroup: Hi, http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/-what-are-best-practices-for-collecting-speech-for-a-free-gpl-speech-corpus Tue, 06 Feb 2007 12:49:27 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/brough-turner-on-creating-large-speech-corpora http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/brough-turner-on-creating-large-speech-corpora Mon, 05 Feb 2007 20:49:05 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/issues-in-collecting-speech-audio-for-free-gpl-speech-corpus Email discussion I had with Arthur Chan (author of the article Do we have a true open source dictation machine?) Hi Arthur, http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/issues-in-collecting-speech-audio-for-free-gpl-speech-corpus Mon, 29 Jan 2007 09:10:18 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/sample-freq-issue-not-covered-by-faq email from Robin: http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/sample-freq-issue-not-covered-by-faq Thu, 21 Dec 2006 12:09:32 -0600 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/librivoxs-audacity-tutorial---how-to-clean-up-background-noise Here is a link to LibriVox's Audacity tutorial http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/librivoxs-audacity-tutorial---how-to-clean-up-background-noise Fri, 13 Oct 2006 12:38:07 -0500 http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/creating-a-cheap-quotrecording-studioquot Shortly put, creating a good recording place boils down to two things: 1) Eliminating external noise.2) Breaking up as much surface as possible to avoid echo.  As to the elimination of external noise, there is only so much you can do without spending a small [or huge] fortune: Pick a room that is the furthest away from trafic-noise. Close doors and windows. Shut the blinders/pull the curtains. (I take it that you have read the documentation, so telling you to turn off the aircondition/fan etc. should not be nessecary at this point). Now we get to the FUN part! You see, the art of braking surface is the art of doing what your mother told you never to do: Making A Mess(TM)! Thats right. What you need to do is to "scientifically" make a mess of the room. First, if there is no carpet on the floor, spreading out books with about a foot apart is a good start, but don't forget to make them stand up open if they can. Also, moving all the plants you have in the other rooms into your recording studio gives good results, as plants have a huge surface. Preferably the plants are placed on chairs, or the like, evenly distributed in the room. But the big problem is the walls... bare walls kill good recordings! Closets, "littered" shelves, racks and framed pictures help a lot here. Just remember that pictures with glass covers are actually worse than a bare wall, as glass bounces more sound than wallpaper! And while we are at it.. so does the hard unbroken surface of a door. The only easy/cheap way I can come up with is to place a mattress in front of it, or if it has a hook, hang your biggest coat on it. Then you systematically inspect the room to check if you can come up with a solution to every surface you see: Can you stand something in front of it?  Can you move it out of the room? Can you pull a blanket over it? Use poster-gum to fasten something to it? Etc. Be inventive!  Once your homebrew recording studio looks pretty much like a warzone you are ready to create clear and noise-free recordings... that is... if you can grab hold of a decent microphone! Have fun making a mess and recording :-) /macavity--FSF Associate member number 3423. http://www.voxforge.org/home/forums/message-boards/audio-discussions/creating-a-cheap-quotrecording-studioquot Thu, 12 Oct 2006 07:33:15 -0500