Speech processing and retrieval in a personal memory aid system for the elderly

• Published in: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) pp. 1749 - 1752
• Main Authors: Sorin, Alexander, Aronowitz, Hagai, Mamou, Jonathan, Toledo-Ronen, Orith, Hoory, Ron, Kuritzky, Michael, Erez, Yael, Ramabhadran, Bhuvana, Sethy, Abhinav
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.05.2011
• Subjects: Ambient Assisted Living; Decision support systems; speaker diarization; speaker identification; Speech transcription; spoken information retrieval
• DOI: 10.1109/ICASSP.2011.5946840
• ISBN: 9781457705380; 1457705389
• ISSN: 1520-6149

The paper presents a new application of automatic speech processing in the Ambient Assisted Living area, developed in the course of a three year research project. Recording and automatic processing of spoken conversations plays a major role in this solution enabling effective search in a personal audio archive and fast browsing of conversations. Processing of elderly conversational speech recorded by a distant PDA microphone poses a great challenge. The speech processing flow includes transcription, speaker tracking and combined indexing and search of spoken terms and participating speakers identity extracted from the audio. We present the entire application and individual speech processing components as well as evaluation results of the individual components and of the end-to-end spoken information retrieval solution.