CU-Move: Advanced In-Vehicle Speech Systems for Route Navigation

In this chapter, we present our recent advances in the formulation and development of an in-vehicle hands-free route navigation system. The system is comprised of a multi-microphone array processing front-end, environmental sniffer (for noise analysis), robust speech recognition system, and dialog manager and information servers. We also present our recently completed speech corpus for in-vehicle interactive speech systems for route planning and navigation. The corpus consists of five domains which include: digit strings, route navigation expressions, street and location sentences, phonetically balanced sentences, and a route navigation dialog in a human Wizard-of-Oz like scenario. A total of 500 speakers were collected from across the United States of America during a six month period from April-Sept. 2001. While previous attempts at in-vehicle speech systems have generally focused on isolated command words to set radio frequencies, temperature control, etc., the CU-Move system is focused on natural conversational interaction between the user and in-vehicle system. After presenting our proposed in-vehicle speech system, we consider advances in multi-channel array processing, environmental noise sniffing and tracking, new and more robust acoustic front-end representations and built-in speaker normalization for robust ASR, and our back-end dialog navigation information retrieval sub-system connected to the WWW. Results are presented in each sub-section with a discussion at the end of the chapter.

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