Speech and audio processing for multimedia communications

Summary form only given. Multimedia communication involves processing, storage, transmission forwarding, and presentation of audiovisual information, and establishing natural interfaces between systems and their users. The computing, communication and integration infrastructures needed to support multimedia applications are also of great interest. Three of the key technologies in realizing multimedia systems are: coding of audiovisual signals, such as speech, audio, image and video; machine synthesis of these signals; and machine recognition and verification of the information embedded in these signals. The article focuses the discussion on speech and audio processing. It addresses the technology dimensions and challenges of speech and audio coding, text-to-speech synthesis, automatic speech recognition, and automatic speaker authentication. It illustrates some of the technology capabilities and limitations by a set of demonstration examples. It also discusses multimedia applications and shows examples of spoken language systems used to enhance multimedia communication between humans and machines.