The Institute for Signal and Information Processing (ISIP) was created in 1994 to develop public domain speech recognition software. One of the primary goals of our program is to educate students and researchers who are new to speech recognition, in addition to providing tools for those already established in the field. Our speech site is a dedicated resource for any and all interested in speech research. The site consists of several sub-sites, including software, databases, and support. In this tutorial I will introduce some of the more popular sections of our website.

Software Downloads

Let's begin with the software downloads, where you will find a comprehensive listing of our software. Previous as well as current software can be found on this page. You can download our latest version of the Production System - a research environment that includes a generalized hierarchical Viterbi search-based decoder and a network trainer recommended for serious speech and signal processing researchers. From any page within the speech site, click on the software link on the left navigation bar. At the bottom of the left column, click on the link to the download archives. Once you have downloaded the software you will want to view our documentation pages described in the next section.




Software Documentation

To better understand out software environment, take a look at our documentation. Within this section of the site you will find extensive documentation for the ISIP foundation classes (IFCs). The IFCs and software environment are designed to provide everything from complex data structures to an abstract file I/O interface. This software environment begins at the lowest level, the operating system (/system), and culminates in a state-of-the-art public domain large vocabulary speech recognition system. This section can be accessed from any ASR page by clicking on the Docs link on the left of the page.

Tutorials

After you have downloaded the software and browsed through the documentation, you will want to learn how to use the software more effectively. In our tutorials we provide comprehensive guides for many aspects of our software and related research activities. Our most popular tutorial focuses on our production software. In this tutorial, we provide detailed examples that you can download and run to verify that your installation is performing correctly. These examples include the necessary data and configuration files to replicate each step in a typical system development cycle. At the end of each section, you will find extensive examples that provide a more integrated view of the topic presented in that section. Finally, the last section in the tutorial is devoted to examples of how to build some of the most popular recognition applications in use today. To navigate to the production tutorial follow these directions. From any page within the ASR site, click the tutorials link on the left of the page.

Java Applets and Demos



Once you become an expert at using our software you may want to peruse our Java applications. These applications demonstrate the usefulness and abilities of our software. Included are demos for Convolution, Dynamic Time-Warping, Filter Design, Pattern Recognition, Pole/Zero Analysis of Linear Systems, and a Spectrum Analysis tool. As an example, the convolution demo provides an interactive animation of two signals as they convolve over time. The user can program ranges and even create custom signals. From any page within the speech site, click on the Demos link located on the left navigation bar. Then, follow the link labeled Java Applications.




Audio Demos

We have also included a collection of demos that contain audio-enhanced web pages demonstrating various phenomena related to speech production and perception. Included are demos to illustrate speech recognition units as well as various transcription challenges. The phonetic units demo allows you to listen to an utterance transcribed using different linguistic units. Common recognition units such as context-dependent phones are included. From any page within the speech site, click on the demos link located on the left navigation bar. Then follow the link labeled Audio Demos.