Speech database acquisition for assisted living environment applications

Home automation has become a subject of increasing interest for both industry and research as there is an increase in the awareness of such systems and their benefits can be easily seen. The new trend is to develop smart homes where commands can be given by speech. This way of communication, besides being the most natural, has the advantage of offering flexibility to the users especially when they have limited motion capabilities. As for widely used languages the state of the art has achieved an important level of performance, little efforts are made with the Romanian language. The main reason for this is the lack of an annotated speech database from real life conditions. This paper focuses on the methodology of acquiring four different speech corpora with various end-user scenarios in mind. The commands corpus is meant to be used in home automation development, the cough corpus is meant to help research in detecting distress situations, the spontaneous speech corpus will aid in distant speech recognition applications and the multi-room, multi-person, multi-language corpus can be used for research in speaker detection and identification. All these were recorded in the context of a completely automated and functional smart home. The small number of such environments available to the public makes these corpora valuable from experimental point of view.