purpose of speech reintegrated microphone for skype calls

In some languages, the time we would wait before we respond is much longer than others, where it is customary to overlap our response with the end of another person’s statement. The tempo and rhythm of our speech, how long we pause and how long we wait after someone has spoken before initiating a response differ across cultures.

In addition, the interpretation of the context changes according to our cultural background. This has to be taken into account when communicating digitally.Įven speech itself is hard to understand without context. This example points to a fact that anthropologists, psychologists, mothers and salespeople know well: non-verbal cues like tone of voice and gesture texture our understanding of any speech-act.

This phenomenon is called the “ McGurk effect”, and shows that speech is seen as well as heard. At this point speech recognition systems are mostly inadequate to the task of conveying and recognising emotion.Įssentially, the same sound will be heard differently depending on the visual signal. The other major challenge to improving speech technologies is related to the emotional content of speech.ĭesigners and researchers know this – but the field of affective computing (computing that influences emotion) is relatively young. Using similar mechanisms the research group Sigmedia hope to improve human-to-machine communication by having machines sense lip and eye movements, gesture and voice. This means using visual data such as tracking lip movements to improve speech recognition and thus the audio signal. At Trinity College Harte is currently working on a project to improve something called “Audio-Visual Speech Recognition”. Researchers are trying to improve human-to-human communication by enhancing how the multimedia capabilities of the internet function together simultaneously. In many situations where humans and gadgets try to talk to each other – through dialogue systems, e-books, tablets, mobile phones and computer games – it is the machine which struggles to understand the spoken cues and then formulate an intelligible and natural sounding response. Wikimedia commons Improving speech quality

We’ve come a little further than that photophone transmitter, but machine communication can still be rough.

Purpose of speech reintegrated microphone for skype calls