Two Top Industry Leaders Speak Out Judith Markowitz When Amy asked me to co-author the foreword to her new book on advances in speech recognition, I was honored. Amy's work has always been infused with c- ative intensity, so I knew the book would be as interesting for established speech professionals as for readers new to the speech-processing industry. The fact that I would be writing the foreward with Bill Scholz made the job even more enjoyable. Bill and I have known each other since he was at UNISYS directing projects that had a profound impact on speech-recognition tools and...

The book provides an anthology of empirical studies of speech technologies for voice reconstruction for those who have lost their natural voices due to largectomies or have severely impaired voices that require speech enhancement. Topics include the use of ASR in medical domain, speech synthesis technologies for individuals with vocal disabilities, statistical alaryngeal speech enhancement for laryngectomees, infant cry analysis and classification, voice pathology analysis and voice conversion for non-vocal speech, and analysis of shouted speech.

This book provides the reader with empirical findings on innovative signal processing approaches to detecting pathologies in infant cries, by comparing new technological approaches to standard ones. The contributors examine novel approaches to machine adaptation to dysarthric speech.

The book explores new ways to reconstruct and enhance speech that is compromised by various neuro-motor disorders – collectively known as “dysarthria.” The authors address some of the extant lacunae in speech research of dysarthric conditions: they show how new methods can improve speaker recognition when speech is impaired due to developmental or acquired pathologies; they present a novel multi-dimensional approach to help the speech system both assess dysarthric speech and to perform intelligibility improvement of the impaired speech; they display well-performing software solutions...