Speech recognition and synthesis in Ukraine
There was a time when Ukraine had been leading the way… In late 60-s of the past century the works of Taras Vintsuk of Kyiv Institute of Cybernetics, were considered to be on the science’s leading edge. And in the former Soviet Union Kyiv Institute of Cybernetics had no rivals in speech recognition.
The Department of Recognition and Synthesis of the International Center for Science and Education in Information Technologies and Systems, located in Kyiv, should be noted as undisputable leaders in Ukrainian speech recognition and synthesis.
The specialists of the Department are working with all of the advanced open-source program packages. We are currently working in the following directions:
- speech recognition; - speaker recognition; - keyword spotting;
Efforts of Tetjana Lyudovyk and Mykola Sazhok, members of the Department, resulted in creation of a Ukrainian speech synthesizer.
It's first application, several years ago, was the Vymova Plus (English translation - pronunciation plus) software.
The same synthesizer is used for synthesizing of Ukrainian pronunciation for SMS2Voice project maintained by Global Messages Services. SMS2Voice project enables sending SMS not only to mobile telephone users, but also to stationary telephones, which substantially extends the possibilities of communicating making it easier and more convenient. In simple words, one can send a SMS to a stationary telephone, and the SMS text will be pronounced.
If you have your own ideas, which realization would involve speech recognition or synthesis related matters, or want to test our recognition for English, Ukrainian, Russian, German, Spanish, Kazakh please get in touch with us at speech_ua at yahoo.com.
Below is an example of news recognition (CNN 10). The text is synchronized with the audio, and clicking on the word will change the slider's time in the player. In blue, the words with a lower probability of recognition are marked, in accordance with the increased likelihood of error.