Skype Journal: Importance of clear audio for VoIP
Read more at http://www.skypejournal.com/blog/
UmeSkype (pronounced "you me skype") is a speech recognition application that allows you to speak commands to make Skype calls, dial SkypeOut numbers (US only for now, sorry rest of the world), search your Skype call log and search your Skype voice mail. The idea is to allow you to interact with Skype in a more natural, intuitive way. More commands will be added in future releases to further enhance your interaction with Skype with simple voice commands to perform complex tasks.
Skype's announcement today would be a welcome change for many Skype users, and the impetus for many to start using Skype.
One annoyance that people (in N. America at least) might have is that you have to type in 12 characters every time you want to dial a number (e.g. +18882303300). UmeSkype allows you to dial numbers (US/Canada) using your voice, so you just say "dial eight eight eight two three zero three three zero zero", which is way faster than clicking on the little window in Skype and typing in 12 characters. We hope that this will make UmeSkype a valuable tool for users. Some obvious enhancements such as "push-to-talk" or "push-to-activate" are in the works.Read more at www.skypejournal.com/bl...
Audio quality is a critical factor in Speech Recognition performance. How do we define audio quality? Or to put it another way, what do we mean when we say that good quality audio is being received by the speech recognition software (or, for that matter, by the listener at the other end of an audio communications channel)?
When using a speech recognition system, one of the critical factors in getting good recognition accuracy is the clarity and fidelity of speech received by the computer. The speech clarity is reduced when there is background noise present near the speaker. Many noise cancelling solutions have been tried to counter this problem, such as the use of DSP technology . The main flaw with many such systems is that they reduce the noise at the expense of the fidelity of the speech, since speech and noise inherently overlap at many frequencies, especially when the noise is competing speech from other speakers in the vicinity.
This is because such systems attempt to remove the noise from the audio signal AFTER the noise and speech are already mixed together. If we could somehow remove the noise before it even gets into the signal, that would enable us to preserve all the critical features of speech, while eliminating the noise, thus sending an optimal audio signal to the speech recognizer. Such a technology has been developed and patented by UmeVoice, and is found in its line of noise cancelling headsets and microphones.