SPEECH PROCESSING

Speech processing is the study of speech signals and the processing methods of these signals and can be regarded as a special case of digital signal processing, applied to speech signals. The greatest step towards this goal is voice recognition technology, where humans can communicate in a way that is natural to them through speech. People with disabilities can benefit from speech processing programs. For individuals that are deaf, dumb or disabled, speech recognition and synthesis software is used to ease communication with machines as well as humans. When a person speaks, he creates vibrations in the air. The analog-to-digital converter (ADC) digitizes this sound by taking precise measurements of the wave at frequent intervals. The system filters the digitized sound to remove unwanted noise, and sometimes to separate it into different bands of frequency. It also adjusts it to a constant volume level (Normalizing). People don't always speak at the same speed, so the sound must be adjusted to match the speed of the template sound samples already stored in the system's memory. Then the signal is divided into small segments. The program then matches these segments to known phonemes in the user known language. A universal translator is still far into the future, a system has not yet been built that combines automatic translation with voice activation technology. One problem is making a system that can flawlessly handle roadblocks like slang, dialects, accents and background noise. The different grammatical structures used by languages can also pose a problem. Advancement in speech processing with parallel developments in image processing, touch technology and augmented reality can also lead to development of robust Natural User Interfacing (NUI) systems which can help humans communicate much more easily to present day complex machinery.