As the size of our computing devices has shrunk significantly, to the point they have become wearable or ubiquitous in our cars and homes, the time has come to move beyond text and embrace speech. In this session, we’ll go from the current state of the industry to the challenges we need to overcome to take Conversational User Interface (CUI) out of the university lab and make it broadly available on a global scale. Looking at different aspects of a solid multilingual CUI, end-to-end, from ASR to TTS (all multilingual of course, and with an attitude and sense of humor – after all, we’re taking Natural Language here), including dialog management, we’ll engage the audience and challenge the industry to really think in terms of what we need to do collaboratively and collectively to build the next generation of CUI on a broad multilingual scale. TAUS has helped speed up the adoption of MT by building a community of users and through TDA (TAUS Data Association), maybe a similar collaborative approach could be used to speed up the development and deployment of global and affordable speech-based solutions. We have an opportunity to not only make it easier for every one of us to communicate with the devices that surround us, but also redefine literacy by enabling the next billion Internet users to access and consume information in a spoken form… Are we going to bridge the digital divide, or are we going to widen the existing gap? The jury is still out in my opinion, will you join us to influence the outcome?

1. © EML European Media Laboratory GmbH
Think beyond the limits!
Automatic Transcription of Speech
From Applied Research to the Market
Dr. Siegfried Kunzmann
Manager R&D
www.eml.org

2. 2 © EML European Media Laboratory GmbH Jimmy Kunzmann
European Media Laboratory (founded 1997)
• Offers: research-based products, solutions and services
Speech transcription: telephone, smartphone, media data
Spoken interaction: speech interfaces
• Portfolio Structure:
Quality
Moni-
toring
Bus.
Ana-
lytics
Cus-
tomer
Sat.
Speech
Analytics
Media
Transcription
Sub-
titling
Media
Ana-
lytics
Video
Re-
trieval
Technology
Markets
Applications
Speech Transcription
(Server)
Spoken
Interaction
(Device)
Assisted
Living
Home
&
Media
Control
Car
Control
Speech
Messaging
Social
Web
Voice
Search
LBS
FAQ
Voice
mail
SMS
e-Mail
App

3. 2 © EML European Media Laboratory GmbH Jimmy Kunzmann
European Media Laboratory (founded 1997)
• Offers: research-based products, solutions and services
Speech transcription: telephone, smartphone, media data
Spoken interaction: speech interfaces
• Portfolio Structure:
Quality
Moni-
toring
Bus.
Ana-
lytics
Cus-
tomer
Sat.
Speech
Analytics
Media
Transcription
Sub-
titling
Media
Ana-
lytics
Video
Re-
trieval
Technology
Markets
Applications
Speech Transcription
(Server)
Spoken
Interaction
(Device)
Assisted
Living
Home
&
Media
Control
Car
Control
Speech
Messaging
Social
Web
Voice
Search
LBS
FAQ
Voice
mail
SMS
e-Mail
App

4. 2 © EML European Media Laboratory GmbH Jimmy Kunzmann
European Media Laboratory (founded 1997)
• Offers: research-based products, solutions and services
Speech transcription: telephone, smartphone, media data
Spoken interaction: speech interfaces
• Portfolio Structure:
Quality
Moni-
toring
Bus.
Ana-
lytics
Cus-
tomer
Sat.
Speech
Analytics
Media
Transcription
Sub-
titling
Media
Ana-
lytics
Video
Re-
trieval
Technology
Markets
Applications
Speech Transcription
(Server)
Spoken
Interaction
(Device)
Assisted
Living
Home
&
Media
Control
Car
Control
Speech
Messaging
Social
Web
Voice
Search
LBS
FAQ
Voice
mail
SMS
e-Mail
App

5. 2 © EML European Media Laboratory GmbH Jimmy Kunzmann
European Media Laboratory (founded 1997)
• Offers: research-based products, solutions and services
Speech transcription: telephone, smartphone, media data
Spoken interaction: speech interfaces
• Portfolio Structure:
Quality
Moni-
toring
Bus.
Ana-
lytics
Cus-
tomer
Sat.
Speech
Analytics
Media
Transcription
Sub-
titling
Media
Ana-
lytics
Video
Re-
trieval
Technology
Markets
Applications
Speech Transcription
(Server)
Spoken
Interaction
(Device)
Assisted
Living
Home
&
Media
Control
Car
Control
Speech
Messaging
Social
Web
Voice
Search
LBS
FAQ
Voice
mail
SMS
e-Mail
App

6. 6 © EML European Media Laboratory GmbH Jimmy Kunzmann
Real-time Speech Recognition: Applications
Audio Streaming Partial Results Infirm Words
Web-Dictation
Voicemail-to-Text Reply
Dictation-Client
Voice Messaging App (local & server)
Zawatzky CenterVoice
Broadcast News Online
Comfort functions
Voice Search
House control

7. 7 © EML European Media Laboratory GmbH Jimmy Kunzmann
Summary
• Focus of the European Media Laboratory
- Provide robust transcription technology, tools, platform
- Partner to expand language portfolio
- License tools, provide expertise, collaborate
- Provide EML transcription technology to system integrators
- Enable on-premise installation und customization
• Speech communication applications are working
- Access to lots of REAL application data helps
- Rapid customization to application domains recommended
Thank You ☺

8. 8 © EML European Media Laboratory GmbH Jimmy Kunzmann
Eureka/ZIM/OCS Project: Mediatranslator
• Mediatranslator: real-time video translation system for the financial market
• Project duration: 2015-2017
• : http://www.eurekanetwork.org/project/id/10357
• Funded by: German and Israeli Ministries of Economy
• Partner:
• Goal: Develop a high-quality, domain-adapted, real-time, tightly-integrated
media-data translator for financial sector videos
• Objectives and Technologies Approach:
• Financial news audio often includes data from mixed sources like read news
from professional speakers, spontaneous speech, noisy outbound
interviews, interviews across telephony lines, often various languages
• several speaker, audio environments, languages and domains
• Tightly integrated modular processing pipeline for ASR & SLT with
• specialized, streaming-enabled modules (e.g. robust online channel,
speaker change and language detection)
• offline target domain optimization
• online domain adaptation (e.g. financial text feeds)

9. 9 © EML European Media Laboratory GmbH Jimmy Kunzmann
EU Marie-Curie Project: LISTEN
• LISTEN: Hands-free voice-enabled interface to web applications for smart home
environments
• Project duration: 2015-2019
• Home page: http://www.listen-project.eu/
• Partner:
• Objectives and Technologies:
• Wireless acoustic sensor network (WASN) designed for smart homes
• Voice access to Internet applications (web search, dictation, social networks)
• Voice control web-enabled “smart” appliances (heating/cooling, lighting, media)
• Bridge the gap between the acoustic front-end and automatic speech recognition
research communities to enable hands-free voice interface.
• Source separation with digital microphone array and speech recognition
• First demo: http://www.listen-project.eu/demonstrations.html

10. 10 © EML European Media Laboratory GmbH Jimmy Kunzmann
EU Project: TC-STAR
• TC-STAR: Technology & Corpora for Speech to Speech Translation (SLT)
• Project duration: 2004-2007
• Goal: advance research in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Spoken
Language Translation (SLT), Text to Speech (TTS) (speech synthesis)
• Objectives:
• Translation of speeches from European Parliament Plenary Sessions
• Speech recognition to perform reliably under varying speaking styles,
recording conditions, for different user communities
• Effective integration of ASR and SLT in a unique statistically sound
framework
• Expressive speech synthesis read and talk in multiple languages
• Evaluations
• Annual competitive evaluations: component technologies, full systems
• Create a technological infrastructure to foster effective delivery and to
assess scientific results