Project Description
The spread of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, equipment and clients is transforming telephony worldwide. In addition to providing very inexpensive, or even free, international telephone calls there is potentially additional benefit in using computer networks to facilitate telephony. Currently hearing impaired and deaf users are excluded from VoIP services; unless the message is in text form to begin with the hearing impaired user cannot access these services effectively. A current draft ETSI standard (ETSI ES 202 975 V0.0.6r3 (2008‐09)) outlines suggested acceptable performance measures for such a system but as yet these have not been verified.
This project looks at the feasibility of utilizing “speech to text” software in order to generate text from natural speech over VoIP and so improve accessibility. The project will assess the accuracy of current state of the art Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) software and also investigate the rationale behind the acceptable performance measure suggested by the draft ETSI document and assess if this is a reasonable level of performance.
Publications
Conference Proceedings
- VoIPText: Voice chat for deaf and hard of hearing people
B Shirley, J Thomas, P Roche
IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics, Berlin, 2012
Technical Reports
- VoIP Text: A study into the effectiveness of speech-to-text as an assistive tool in VoIP communications. Phase 1 Report. Published by Ofcom.
B Shirley, J Thomas - VoIP Text A study into the effectiveness of speech-to-text as an assistive tool in VoIP communications Phase 2 Report, published by Ofcom.
B Shirley, I Rattigan
More Information
Further details can be found at the project blog.