Thai Speech Recognition Service Project

     Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become an accessible technology used extensively in modern mobile phones. Thai ASR is however in its development phase. Several components including fundamental language and speech processing tools and speech resources are required to make the technology usable for Thai speakers. Thai Speech Recognition Service is the newest project granted by NECTEC (2013-2014), aiming to provide a platform for accelerating Thai ASR research and development. The project will finally provide an open-domain Thai ASR service available as a domestic infrastructure for software developers to innovate their applications.

 

 

Partii, a Co-Creation Platform to Springboard Thai ASR

     A difficulty in building practical ASR is insufficient language and speech resources. This problem could be alleviated if the speaking domain and environment are scoped. However, ASR built specifically for one task may not work effectively in the other tasks. Building open-domain ASR is hence convincing as it could be an initial tool for any task. Language model and acoustic model adaptation is then applied to enhance ASR performance if domain resources are available.

 

     To construct open-domain ASR, large-scale language resources gathered from real usages are required. This becomes the Partii, a platform for gathering open-domain Thai speech and text. The Partii iOS App allows Thai speakers to send SMS by using their natural voice. User voices and transcribed messages will be used for continuous improvement of Thai ASR. 

 

      The Partii engine has then been improved periodically during the project term (2013-2014) and now achieve an acceptable performance for customizing to potential applications.

 

R&D Team and Partners

Speech and Audio Technology Lab

Intelligent Informatics Research Unit, NECTEC

Chai  Wutiwiwatchai  Project leader

Vataya Chunwijitra  ASR research

Kwanchiva Thangthai  ASR research

Sila Chunwijitra  System engineering

Nattapong  Kurpukdee  System engineering

Phuttapong  Sertsi    Innovation and application

Sawit Kasuriya  Technology transfer

 

Department of Computer Engineering

Chulalongkorn University

 

Atiwong  Suchato  Project co-research