LABORATORY OF PHONETICS AND SPEECH TECHNOLOGY
PHONETICS AND SPEECH TECHNOLOGY
HEAD OF THE PROJECT
Einar MEISTER
MAIN RESEARCH AREAS IN PHONETICS
- "The Sound Patterns of Estonian" – a fundamental acoustic- perceptional research of the sound system of Estonian
- Word Prosody – Estonian foot accents (quantity degrees) in the hierarchical frame of word prosody; a new mora treatment of the accents
MAIN RESEARCH AREAS IN SPEECH TECHNOLOGY
- Speaker Recognition – experimental system for text-prompted speaker verification using artificial neural networks
- Text-to-Speech Synthesis – expert system for speech synthesis development; rule-based synthesis control; synthesizers for Estonian, Russian, Finnish; MBROLA diphone synthesis of Estonian
- Speech Analysis – time-domain pitch extractor, measurement of harmonic factor of speech signals
INTERNATIONAL CO-OPERATION
COPERNICUS-project No. 1304 "BABEL – A MULTI-LANGUAGE DATABASE"
- AIM
- Creation of the phonetic databases of Bulgarian, Estonian, Hungarian, Polish and Romanian for phonetic research and development of speech technology products (speech and speaker recognition, speech synthesis, etc.).
- PARTNERS
- 12 laboratories from different European countries
- DATES
- March 1, 1995 - February 28, 1998, extended to August 31, 1998
- RESULTS for Estonia
- technology and methodology for development of re-usable language resources
- systematic and representative text corpus of Estonian
- description of Estonian phonetics
- recordings of the text corpus with 70 speakers (35 male and 35 female)
- 3 CD-ROMs with speech material and transcription
