The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) is helping create innovative speech recognition solutions with self-imposed time and data limitations for different languages. ICSI facilitates research in computer science and is an independent, nonprofit research institute in the United States.  It has built many speech recognition systems over the past several years and through this project aims to solve fundamental problems in speech recognition to address the Babel challenge.

These partners aim to design new methods for development of speech models for languages that could be popular in the coming years. The team intends to use the training data to build speech recognition systems for several languages by the end of the IARPA Babel program.

“The goal of the Babel program is to rapidly build speech recognition systems to support effective keyword search for new languages using limited amounts of transcribed speech recorded in real-world conditions,” said Mary Harper, the IARPA program manager in charge of the Babel program, in a statement.

The team will work on many languages and will research basic principles of speech technology instead of focusing on incremental improvements to existing technology. The partners hope that this research will also help in enabling keyword-search systems for languages that do not have large amounts of transcribed audio.

“ICSI excels at intellectual challenges and unique approaches to research. This is an intriguing project that puts significant constraints on our researchers as a means to discover better ways to develop automatic speech recognition systems,” said Roberto Pieraccini, director and president of ICSI.

Recently, ICSI was in news for announcing the appointment of six members to its board of trustees.

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