HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: mylene@swanee.ee.uwa.edu.au (Mylene Pijpers)
Subject: isolated digits databases
Organization: Elec Eng, Univ of Western Australia
Date:  6 Oct 92 06:54:48 GMT



Hi,

We are working on speaker-independent recognition of isolated digits.

Because we reached the point where improvements in recognition results 
might either be due to an improvent of the system, or due to an
insufficiently large data~set we are currently looking for large 
speech~databases of isolated digits.
Ideally we need some 1000 speakers to avoid speaker related overtraining.
Somehow it seems there are no such databases around, at least we have not
been able to locate them.

So here is the urgent question:

Any, I repeat, ANY leads to the whereabouts of large databases of
isolated digits are welcome at this e-mail address.


I promise to post a summary. 
And it might be a subject for a Frequently Asked Questions file.


Mylene





Myl\`ene Pijpers    --    mylene@swanee.ee.uwa.edu.au    |   _--_|\
Centre for Intelligent Information Processing Systems    |  /ciips \ 
The University of Western Australia                      |  *_.--._/    
NEDLANDS WA 6009 Australia      Phone: +61-9-380-3897    |        v
From: jpi@cs.bham.ac.uk (Jon Iles)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Speech Synthesis Software
Date: 2 Oct 92 14:35:47 GMT
Organization: School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, UK

Hi there ! 

Just a quick question about software based speech synthesis products.
I'd be very interested to hear from anyone regarding the availability
of commercial / public domain / shareware software such as the Klatt
software based speech synthesizer. I hasten to add I'm mainly
interested in software to perform conversion from parameters to a
speech signal, rather than complete text to speech systems.

If people can mail me with details (j.p.iles@uk.ac.bham.cs), then I
will post a summary if there is enough interest.

Thanks in advance, 

                   Jon

-- 
==========================================================================
School of Computer Science,       | j.p.iles@uk.ac.bham.cs
University of Birmingham,         |   
Birmingham, B15 2TT. UK           |
From: lels@unpcs1.cs.unp.ac.za (Leonard Els)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Help on design of speech recognition
Keywords: speech recognition
Date: 6 Oct 92 07:10:27 GMT
Article-I.D.: unpcs1.lels.9.718355427
Distribution: world
Organization: Dept. Computer Science, UNP
NNTP-Posting-Host: pc013.cc.unp.ac.za

Hi,

I am working on a Speaker Independant Speech Recognition system and was
wondering what the best measurements are, to use in the analysis.

I have come accross the following: Zero-Crossing rate, Energy, LPC,
Cepstral Coefficients, and formant analysis

Can I use formant analysis for speaker independant recognition? - or
should I rather use something else - If formant analysis is not a good
idea - why not?

Reply to email: lels@unpcs1.cs.unp.ac.za
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: d88-jwa@alv.nada.kth.se (Jon Wtte)
Subject: Re: Mac/Amiga speech, non-english languages
Originator: d88-jwa@alv.nada.kth.se
Organization: Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
	<1992Oct2.222025.27565@sunova.ssc.gov>
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1992 11:45:28 GMT

> blocker@dominic.ssc.gov (Rich Hall) writes:

   There were several requests for Mac speech synthesizers. MacInTalk is a
   Borland utility that came with my version of Turbo Pascal for the Mac. 
   If I remember correctly, you could write to it just as easily at writing
   to standard output or a data file.
   The default mode was full text-to-speech conversion, but there was also a
   phoneme mode. 

No,

MacinTalk was a library from Apple, using the original sound driver
for the Mac 128k. This is '83 technology for PCs, not very hot...
Borland bundled the library with its pascal compiler, but since
Borland didn't have the drive to support that product, the compiler
is not available since several years.

The original Sound Driver calls are somewhat out of mode these days :-)
and MacinTalk, being a library and not trap based, is not compatible
with the enwest machines or system software version. HOWEVER - Apple
has some quite exciting voice activities going on, both in recognition
and text-to-speech. Text-to-speech appears to be in beta, though
seeding is limited, and they have one high-end engine (doing both
female and male voices really well) and one low-end engine (targetted
as generally available, so everyone can have it and developers get
the support for using SpeakString()...)

For those familiar with DecTalk, the new high-end package is much
better (but uses more memory...) Didn't Apple buy DecTalk some time
ago?

   characters of all fonts, styles, and sizes with a very high degree of
   accuracy. Then, these OCR algothms were adapted, with minor modifications,
   to reading handwriting. Are these same pattern-matching routines being
   used to match vocal sound waves to those of standard phonemes?

No. First, you have more information in handwriting (you know which
way the character was drawn) but you have more variety, so handwriting
is NOT (or should not be) done with traditional OCR techniques. Also,
recognizing phonemes is probably best done in the fourier domain,
whereas OCR pattern-matching is done in the sample domain.

   QuickTime on the Mac and MicroChannel IBMs have made significant advances 
   toward competing with the Amiga's separate Audio and Video coprocessors, 
   and have the advantage of being more widely available. Multimedia packages 

And have the advantage of being an emerging standard, and having
well-defined APIs and file exchange formats. I think that is much
more important than whatever the current hardware "can do." Also,
QuickTime is not only sound & video, it's a way of referring to
information with a time code.

Now, is there an online place I can find more information on
distinguishing phonemes in written english (or other) text?

Cheers,

-- 
Jon W{tte, h+@nada.kth.se, Sweden, Phone +46-8-107069

"From now on, I think I'll re-label the EQ on the
 desk as Fizz and Wobble, rather than HF and LF."
Newsgroups: comp.speech,comp.ai
From: ueberla@cs.sfu.ca (Joerg Ueberla)
Subject: language modeling for speech recognition
Keywords: language modeling, speech recognition
Organization: CSS, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 16:37:47 GMT

 I am working on language modeling for speech recognition. Is there any
 implementation of the Npos or Ngram model available? Is anyone willing
 to send me some code, even if it is not nice, without comments etc? It
 would always be better than starting from scratch. I would really
 appreciate your help.

 Joerg
 (ueberla@cs.sfu.ca)
From: asper@time.sbc.com (Alan E. Asper)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Re: prosody
Keywords: prosody
Date: 5 Oct 92 15:19:53 GMT
Organization: Southwestern Bell Technology Resources, St.Louis, MO

In article <karenj.718267851@munagin> karenj@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU (Karen Jenkin) writes:
>I am curious about whether any prosody processing has been researched
>in speech recogntion (more specifically phonemes).
>The analysis of prosody could also be being used in the "voice-stress"
>experiments recently discussed in this group.
>
>Can anyone direct me to some refs. or ftp sites on the subject of prosody?
>
>Thanks in advance,
>Karen
>
I am also interested in this area. If anyone who has this information would
be nice enough to send it my way, too, I would really appreciate it.
Thanks,
Alan
From: eab@msc.edu (Edward Bertsch)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: WANTED: ms-dos text-to-speech
Date: 2 Oct 92 06:04:25 GMT
Organization: Minnesota Supercomputer Center, Minneapolis, MN


I am curious as to if there is any software available for ibm compatible
machines running DOS (or window for that matter) that will do text to
speech.  Ideally, it would be 'sampled' speech as opposed to that nasty
sounding synthesized speech.  Also ideally, it would not require any
additional hardware (i.e. it could use the built in speaker) but could
take advantage of (for example) a sound blaster if it were present.

It could be a stand alone program, although something integrated into
terminal software would be very good.  (the intended application is
for a blind guy interested in using a bbs)

Thanks a bunch,

Ed

--

Edward A. Bertsch (eab@msc.edu)   Minnesota Supercomputer Center, Inc.
Operations/User Services          1200 Washington Avenue South
(612) 626-1888 work               Minneapolis, Minnesota  55415
(612) 645-0168 voice mail         [DISCLAIMER: MY OPINIONS; NOT MSCI'S]

      ___________________________________________________
      Dump the Republocrats:      vote Libertarian in '92
      ---------------------------------------------------

% echo "potatoe potato" | spell
potatoe
%
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: orloff@surya4.cern.ch (Jean Orloff)
Subject: French Text2Speech???
Organization: CERN, European Research Center for Particle Physics
Distribution: comp
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 09:05:28 GMT

I realise this is supposed to be a highly professional newsgroup but
still, I'm curious to know if anybody ever saw a cheap software able to speak
out in French (or actually in any other language than English). 

I have access to a variety of computers, but would be most interested
in Macintosh or Atari programs.

Sincerely,
Jean
--
*************************************************************************
*	Jean Orloff		*	e-mail: ORLOFF@dxcern.cern.ch	*
*	TH-Division, CERN	*	phone:	(41-22) 767-3204	*
*	CH-1211 Geneva 23	*	fax:	(41-22) 782-3914	*
*************************************************************************
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: mdchaney@fractal.ucs.indiana.edu (M Darrin Chaney)
Subject: TMS5220 speech synthesizer
Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 15:26:54 GMT

Does anyone have a programming manual for the TMS5220 chip from TI?  This
was used in their home computer 12 years ago, and produced excellent speech
(very near human quality) at about 200bytes/second.  All I know now is that
it used a mathematical model of the human vocal tract.  I've not been able
to ever find programming help for it, not even from TI.  I've also checked
the library thoroughly.

Any pointers would be appreciated.

Thanks.

	Darrin
-- 

mdchaney@iubacs mdchaney@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu mdchaney@rose.ucs.indiana.edu

"This is a .signature."
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: bert@fred.Berkeley.EDU (Bert Shi)
Subject: survey papers
Organization: UC Berkeley, University of California Berkeley
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 15:41:04 GMT

I am interested in getting some idea of the "state of the art"
in speech recognition research, both in academia and industry.  This
may be an FAQ, but I'm not aware that an FAQ list has been set up
for this group yet.  If not, the results may be interesting to include
in such a list.  

If you know of any good survey papers in speech recognition, please
email to me and I'll summarize and post to the net.

Thanks,

bert shi

Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: weed@venus.ycc.yale.edu
Subject: re: WANTED: ms-dos text-to-speech
Organization: Yale Computer Center (YCC)
Date: 4 Oct 92 08:56:56 EDT

Please, Please, remember that there are other possible answers.  Various
Macintosh-based applications are coming to market, which, I think will handle
as well, or better, than anything out (in terms of PC software), in the
availability of control over one's computer.  I am currently writing this post
on a mac, using Berkeley Systems' "outSPOKEN" a product which I am *very* happy
with.  If ther   are  blind users out there, who haven't looked at Macintoshes
because of the perceived vision-biased user interface, it may not be as much of
a problem as you might think.  
Matt Weed
From: horacio@iastate.edu (Horacio Martinez-Alfaro)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Looking for VOC and WOB data formats.
Date: 6 Oct 92 15:17:30 GMT
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, IA


Does anyone have some information on how files are written (structure)
with these formats ? I need to have access to voice data written with
those formats. Thanks in advanced for your help.

-- Horacio.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 Horacio Martinez-Alfaro      |               horacio@iastate.edu
 Mechanical Eng. Dept.        | "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and
 Iowa State University        |  look around once in a while, you'll miss it"
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: jsgn3@fel.tno.nl (Jos Groot)
Subject: ADDA10.ZIP - AD/DA board design for PC's
Summary: Announcement of archive with design for PC AD/DA board
Keywords: dsp,sound effects,ad,da,guitar,pc
Organization: TNO Physics and Electronics Laboratory
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 16:47:14 GMT

Maybe the next announcement I posted a week ago on alt.guitar,
comp.music,sci.electronics and comp.dsp is also of some interest to
the comp.speech readers:

------------------------

In reaction to requests of some people for details about the analog I/O
board I built for a PC, I recently uploaded the ADDA10.ZIP archive 
(directory <MSDOS.SOUND>) to the SIMTEL anonymous FTP site (address
WSMR-SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL, 192.88.110.20):

<MSDOS.SOUND>
ADDA10.ZIP      ADC/DAC board for DSP experiments;TP src/exe

The archive describes how to build and use a simple low cost analog I/O 
extension board for PC's. It utilizes the 8-bit AD7569 IC containing a
500 KHz analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a 1 MHz digital-to-analog
converter (DAC). The card can for example be used to sample sound
with the ADC and play it back through the DAC in real time, possibly after 
some `on-the-fly' digital signal processing. Files included are:

1. construction/operation description
2. electronic/layout sketch diagrams
3. Turbo Pascal 6.0 source and executable code for using the card. It includes
   routines implementing two digital (guitar) sound effects, i.e., a distortion
   and echo. These routines demonstrate the basics of the digital sound 
   processing techniques used in dedicated sound effect processors.

The files of 1. and 2. are suitable for downloading to HP Laserjet or 
PostScript compatible printers.


-- 
Jos Groot (jos.groot@fel.tno.nl)
Physics and Electronics Laboratory TNO-FEL 
P.O.box 96864
2509 JG  The Hague, The Netherlands
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: mef@june.cs.washington.edu (Marc E. Fiuczynski)
Subject: Re: WANTED: ms-dos text-to-speech
Organization: University of Washington Computer Science
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 92 03:22:27 GMT

Hi,

In comp.newprod a company is offering a text-to-speech API callable (I
assume) from a C program.  However, it is written for the NeXT
workstation and probably requires to use the built in DSP 56001.

Marc
From: dkroy+@CS.CMU.EDU (Deb Roy)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Re: prosody
Keywords: prosody
Date: 5 Oct 92 21:16:52 GMT
Organization: Carnegie Mellon University


You might want to check out:

Waibel, A. "Prosodic Knowledge sources for word hypothesization in a 
continuous speech recognition system", IEEE ICASSP'87 Proceedings,
pp20.16.1-20.16.4.IEEE, 1987.


There are some further refs in this paper, including Waibel's 1986 thesis
on the topic of Prosody.

Deb Roy
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: metzlers@spot.Colorado.EDU (METZLER SANDRA TAIMI)
Subject: ANN's for Recognition Systems
Summary: Why not Hopfield nets?
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Date: Sun, 4 Oct 1992 01:28:54 GMT

Being fairly new to the world of speech recognition and the world of
artificial neural nets, I keep coming across the following question (in
my own mind):

I notice that all the speech recog. systems I have seen which are based
on ANN's use a backpropogation net.  My question is: why this type of
net?  Why not use a Hopfield net--somehow, the idea of the resonances
of a Hopfield net (or one of that type) really appeals to me.  I 
understand one objection to the idea is that for an H. net, you 'have
to the know the categories before you begin'--but would it be possible
to create a complex end state, one based on a prototypical sound (eg.
/i/), whereupon the task of the net after training is the classification
of a series of states (eg. a 10msec window of a digitized sound wave)
into the predetermined states (which are prototypical)?  Does this make
sense?

It seems to me that a backprop net also has a certain amount of predeter-
minism in that you have X number of outputs, no more, no less.  It seems
that in both you are working to classify an unknown new sound into one
of a series of choices, and because with a backprop you know what you want
the choices to be ahead of time, the main difference in a hopfield net
is the concious presetting of the end-states.  Hence my question concerning
the possibility of complex end states.

On a similar vein, what about using a Kohonen self-organizing map?  
Intuitively, this seems attractive, but I can't think of a way to make
it work (I am, as i said, a beginner in this field).

Many thanks for any hints, ideas, references, or other information you can
give.

taimi metzler
metzlers@spot.colorado.edu

Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: ronzu@comm.mot.com (Ron Zuckerman)
Subject: Re: Vowel Formant Analysis
Reply-To: ronzu@comm.mot.com
Organization: Motorola
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 15:14:32 GMT

In article 1146@agog.com, greg@agog (Greg Cockroft) writes:
>I'm working on vowel formant analysis of 8Khz mulaw sound.
>
>I have the complex roots of the Z transform, but I don't know how covert  
>those into frequencies.
>
[table deleted]

f = arg(real+j*imag) * fs / (2*pi)

where:

                       { arctan(imag/real)          real >= 0
    arg(real+j*imag) = { arctan(imag/real) + pi     real < 0, imag >= 0
                       { arctan(imag/real) - pi     real < 0, imag < 0

    fs = sampling frequency

However, since you're dealing with a real valued signal, you can take the absolute
value of the frequency from the above formula.          

---
------------------------------------------------------------------
| Ron Zuckerman, KA4RPD  E-mail: ronzu@isu.comm.mot.com          |
| Phone: (708)538-3134   FAX: (708)538-2818                      |
------------------------------------------------------------------
| "A madman got us into this, and it's beginning to look as if   |
|  only a madman can get us out." -- Chekov                      |
------------------------------------------------------------------
From: nakano@suncom1.cs.shinshu-u.ac.jp (NAKANO Yasuaki)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Re: Wanted:Head & shoulder image & speech data
Date: 2 Oct 92 05:46:17 GMT
Reply-To: nakano@suncom1.cs.shinshu-u.ac.jp (NAKANO Yasuaki)
Organization: Dept. of Information Engineering, Shinshu Univ.,500 wakasato, Nagano, Japan

In article <1992Oct1.235438.4890@ucc.su.OZ.AU> luosu@waves.su.OZ.AU (Luo Su Huai) writes:
>I am doing some work on synthesizing human face image through speech for my 
>Ph.D thesis. Now I urgently need the sample data,both in image and in speech.

I can not help on this issue itself, but this article reminds me
a research done by a Japanese several years ago. He announced that
he succeeded in synthesizing human's voice from his/her face image.

He synthesized the voice of Mona Lisa from the picture by Leonard Da 
Vinci. He was very wise, because noone could not say how close the 
synthesized voice was to the genuine one.

Yasuaki NAKANO
nakano@wakasato.cs.shinshu-u.ac.jp
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: s1076137@giaec.cc.monash.edu.au (Andrew Lade)
Subject: voice output of text on a Macintosh
Organization: Monash University College Gippsland, Churchill, 3842, Australia
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1992 04:29:06 GMT


I have a Macintosh LC and I would like to know what software is available to
read my word proccessing document back to me after I have typed it.

I am not sure if this group dicusses this kind of thing, so I decided to post
in the hope that someone can suggest something for me.

Thanks in advance...
Andrew Lade
3 Rae Crescent Churchill          Monash University College Gippsland
From: bewhite@matt.ksu.ksu.edu (MacroMan)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Re: WANTED: ms-dos text-to-speech
Date: 5 Oct 1992 16:01:25 -0500
Organization: Kansas State University
NNTP-Posting-Host: matt.ksu.ksu.edu

mikef@pacifier.rain.com (Mike Freeman) writes:
>The SoundBlaster has the same problem:  it's sluggish in responding to
>user commands.  As far as I know, only one program, Tinytalk, has a SB
>driver, the latest version is TTALK130.ZIP and can be found on many
>BBSs.  I believe it's on NFB's own BBS, NFBNET, telephone
>(410)752-5011.

  Could some kind soul upload this to SimTel?  I can't find
it anywhere on the internet, and don't have money to use
for long distance downloads.
  thanks,
-- 
  Bruce White(bewhite@matt.ksu.ksu.edu)
  "Back off man, I'm a scientist." - W. Murray
Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: horacio@iastate.edu (Horacio Martinez-Alfaro)
Subject: Re: It is VOC and WAB (not WOB).
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, IA
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 16:11:26 GMT



Newsgroups: comp.speech
From: george@beta.ee.ufl.edu (George L)
Subject: Re: Voice Stress Analysis
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 92 00:14:53 GMT

In article <9227613.17164@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> mkwan@cs.mu.OZ.AU (Matthew Kwan) writes:
>I suppose this is the right newsgroup ...
>
>Here and there I've come across vague references to a technique
>known as voice stress analysis, which allegedly works as a form
>of lie detector. Now that I've got my hands on some audio sampling
>equipment, I'd really like to give it a try.
>
>Can anyone explain how it works, or at least point me in the
>direction of some references? Any information would be appreciated,

For a low-level, experimenter type coverage, try looking in some back issues 
of the electronics hobbyist magazines. I seem to remember seeing the plans 
for such a project in Popular Electronics or Radio Electronics a few years 
back. Maybe someone out there has the correct reference? It would also be 
interesting to see a compilation of research references.

Actually, this is an extremely timely subject. With the upcoming elections, 
we will have a wealth of valid data (complete with video as well). If some-
one finds a decent approach, we can all calibrate our equipment direct 
from the lips of our politicians.
From: dfrankow@deci.cs.umn.edu (Dan Frankowski)
Newsgroups: comp.speech
Subject: Re: WANTED: ms-dos text-to-speech
Date: 2 Oct 92 13:47:05 GMT
Organization: University of Minnesota

In <1ahg9qINNkcr@golem.wcc.govt.nz> harvey_a@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz writes:

>In article <1992Oct2.060425.18579@uc.msc.edu>,
 eab@msc.edu (Edward Bertsch) writes:
>>
>>I am curious as to if there is any software available for ibm compatible
>>machines running DOS (or window for that matter) that will do text to
>>speech.  Ideally, it would be 'sampled' speech as opposed to that nasty
>>sounding synthesized speech..

>All the Text to speach progs I have found in my searches seem to sound like
>some sort of electronic chinaman speaking while gargling a glass of water (in
>other words uninteligable :-)) ..

>Incedentaly, If it's well done, synthesized speech will sound much better than
>sampled stuff as it will get the inflections right, whereas sampled stuff
>tends to sound a little strange....

>| Adrian Harvey       (Harvey_A@kosmos.wcc.govt.nz)|

I read a letter in CACM that said (paraphrased from memory), "Since
many computer scientists working on programs for the blind or deaf are
not so themselves, they sometimes do not fully understand the problems
involved.  For instance, while synthesized speech might not sound as
'natural', it is regular and fast, so that a blind person may speed it
up and use it to read faster, although a sighted person cannot
understand it."

Dan

--
Dan Frankowski                dfrankow@cs.umn.edu
Newsgroups: comp.speech