Speech Technology Theory and Applications

New Trends in Speech Based Interactive Systems will give an overview of the research and application of speech technologies in different areas. The basic technology development areas include: Automatic speech recognition technology, speech synthesis, spoken interaction, natural language understanding, speaker recognition, emotion in spoken dialogue systems, expressive speech synthesis, affective computing, multimodal communication, interaction technologies, and animated agents. The application areas include: in-vehicle information system and interaction, military application, other industrial applications such as for space, air traffic control, or complicated control room interaction, simulator control, etc., and application for special users and in entertainment systems. General design and usability evaluation methodologies from the user’s perspective will also be included in the book.

The overview of each technology includes: 1. The history and the development of the technology. 2. What are the hot research topics/interests in the technology? 3. What kind of mistakes/assumption that people has tried, so to avoid repeating the mistakes. 4. What can be the special interests/problems in different application areas? 5. The trend of the technical development in the coming few years.

The overview of each application area includes: 1. The history of the application studies. 2. What kind of speech technologies are interested in the application. 3. The analysis of the factors that affect the real-time application. 4. What can be the possible usability requirements and interaction design problems? 5. The trend of the research focus in the coming few years.

One of the special characteristics of the book is that the authors will not just present their own research work, but take a broad view of the multiple research areas and take the multidisciplinary approach to the topics. One of the goals in this book is to emphasize the application. User experience, human factors and usability issues are the focus in this book.

History and Development of Speech Recognition.- Challenges in Speech Synthesis.- Spoken Language Dialogue Models.- The Industry of Spoken-Dialog Systems and the Third Generation of Interactive Applications.- Deceptive Speech: Clues from Spoken Language.- Cognitive Approaches to Spoken Language Technology.- Expressive Speech Processing and Prosody Engineering: An Illustrated Essay on the Fragmented Nature of Real Interactive Speech.- Interacting with Embodied Conversational Agents.- Multimodal Information Processing for Affective Computing.- Spoken Language Translation.- Application of Speech Technology in Vehicles.- Spoken Dialogue Application in Space: The Clarissa Procedure Browser.- Military Applications: Human Factors Aspects of Speech-Based Systems.- Accessibility and Design for All Solutions Through Speech Technology.- Assessment and Evaluation of Speech-Based Interactive Systems: From Manual Annotation to Automatic Usability Evaluation.

Dr. Chen is an associate professor at the Computing Science Department, Chalmers
University of Sweden. She has been working in Human Factors and Ergonomics
research for over 20 years and has published over 20 papers in the cognitive science
specially related to speech technology application. Chen has over 20 years teaching and
research experience on ergonomics, human factors and human-computer interaction.
She has been teaching on human cognition, human-computer interaction, usability and
user-centered design, and research methodology in undergraduate and graduate level. In
the past 8 years, her research interests in focused on speech and multimodal interaction
design in different applications.

Dr. Jokinen is a Professor of Language Technology at the University of Helsinki. She
has played a leading role in several academic and industrial research projects
concerning spoken dialogue systems, cooperative communication, adaptation, and
multimodality. She has published a large number of articles and papers, organized many
workshops in major international workshops, and given several invited talks and
seminars. She is the secretary of the SIGDial, the ISCA/ACL Special Interest Group for
Discourse and Dialogue.