WWW pages of 3rd European Master School on Language and Speech

The African Speech Technology Project

Bart Mellebeek
(KU Leuven)

The African Speech Technology (AST) Project is the title of a 3-year project, started in 2000, to promote the development of the official languages of South Africa through language and speech technology applications. The project is funded by the South African government and is conducted by a consortium of interdisciplinary teams from several universities in the country. The three main goals of the project are:

  1. To develop linguistic models of discourse and create re-usable digital speech and text resources for interactive voice based information retrieval systems in the official languages of South Africa.
  2. To adapt current state-of-the-art speech recognition and speech synthesis technologies to the specific acoustic characteristics of the official languages of South Africa.
  3. To combine the created linguistic models, the gathered speech and text data and the adapted technologies to produce a prototype of a voice-based hotel booking system in the following five languages: South African English, Afrikaans, Sesotho, Zulu and Xhosa. This prototype will then serve as a basis for future development of dialogue systems in other fields, such as banking, travel, meteorological information, etc.
The presentation will give a general outline of the basic components used in the development of the AST dialogue prototype, with a special focus on the finite-state driven natural language understanding module.