WebVoice: A Toolkit for Perceptual Insights into Speech Processing

Feature extraction and modeling techniques for speech processing are often complex. Understanding a new technique theoretically can be difficult for a novice, just as it is difficult for a practitioner to find the best parameter settings and/or combination of methods for a new task or data. In this paper, a novel approach and a corresponding software toolkit for facilitating both education and experimentation in speech processing is presented: listening to the results of feature extraction and modeling is made possible via resynthesis of intermediate pattern recognition results. The software is made publicly available as a Web service called WebVoice with accompanying user interfaces for ease of use.