Introduction of the METI project “development of fundamental speech recognition technology”

Waseda University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and six companies, Asahi-kasei, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, NEC, Oki and Toshiba, initiated a three year project in 2006 supported by the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Trade (METI), Japan, for jointly developing fundamental automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology. The project focuses on utilizing ASR technology in car and home environments. Seven subtasks are being investigated: speech/non-speech separation using multiple microphones, speech/non-speech separation for a single audio stream, developing a high-performance WFST-based decoder, multi-lingual ASR modeling, higher-order language modeling, developing a system for assisting speech interface development, and overall technology evaluation. This talk will give an overview of the intermediate technological progress achieved by the project.