A theoretical, technical description of the basic knowledge and ideas that constitute a modern system for speech recognition by machine. The book covers areas including production, perception and acoustic-phonetic characterization of the speech signal and signal processing recognition.

An emerging technology, Speaker Recognition is becoming well-known for providing voice authentication over the telephone for helpdesks, call centres and other enterprise businesses for business process automation. "Fundamentals of Speaker Recognition" introduces Speaker Identification, Speaker Verification, Speaker (Audio Event) Classification, Speaker Detection, Speaker Tracking and more. The technical problems are rigorously defined, and a complete picture is made of the relevance of the discussed algorithms and their usage in building a comprehensive Speaker Recognition System. Designed as a textbook with examples and exercises at the end of each chapter, "Fundamentals of Speaker Recognition" is suitable for advanced-level students in computer science and engineering, concentrating on biometrics, speech recognition, pattern recognition, signal processing and, specifically, speaker recognition. It is also a valuable reference for developers of commercial technology and for speech scientists. Please click on the link under "Additional Information" to view supplemental information including the Table of Contents and Index.

Foreword Looking back the past 30 years. we have seen steady progress made in the area of speech science and technology. I still remember the excitement in the late seventies when Texas Instruments came up with a toy named "Speak-and-Spell" which was based on a VLSI chip containing the state-of-the-art linear prediction synthesizer. This caused a speech technology fever among the electronics industry. Particularly. applications of automatic speech recognition were rigorously attempt ed by many companies. some of which were start-ups founded just for this purpose. Unfortunately. it did not take long before they realized that automatic speech rec ognition technology was not mature enough to satisfy the need of customers. The fever gradually faded away. In the meantime. constant efforts have been made by many researchers and engi neers to improve the automatic speech recognition technology. Hardware capabilities have advanced impressively since that time. In the past few years. we have been witnessing and experiencing the advent of the "Information Revolution." What might be called the second surge of interest to com mercialize speech technology as a natural interface for man-machine communication began in much better shape than the first one. With computers much more powerful and faster. many applications look realistic this time. However. there are still tremendous practical issues to be overcome in order for speech to be truly the most natural interface between humans and machines.

The production of truly natural-sounding speech still poses considerable problems, and the reliable recognition of continuous speech is still open to major improvements. This text captures the essential elements of current research on artificial speech synthesis and recognition.

This book on Robust Speech Recognition and Understanding brings together many different aspects of the current research on automatic speech recognition and language understanding. The first four chapters address the task of voice activity detection which is considered an important issue for all speech recognition systems. The next chapters give several extensions to state-of-the-art HMM methods. Furthermore, a number of chapters particularly address the task of robust ASR under noisy conditions. Two chapters on the automatic recognition of a speaker's emotional state highlight the importance of natural speech understanding and interpretation in voice-driven systems. The last chapters of the book address the application of conversational systems on robots, as well as the autonomous acquisition of vocalization skills.