Abstract

Aims: To develop Spoken Dialogue System in Indian language with Voice response and voice based biometric feature.

Background: Most of research works in spoken dialogue system are carried out in U.S. and Europe and currently, few government funding projects on spoken dialogue system (SDS) are carried out in Indian academic institutes.

Objective: We have tried to use our developed spoken language system to eliminate the desktop clutter. It is very normal tendency of computer users to place the most frequently used files, folders, applications shortcuts on their computer’s desktop. Cluttering of desktop not only slows down the productivity of computer but also looks very messy and very difficult to find files as well. Therefore, we tried to use the spoken dialogue system to eliminate the desktop clutters in painless manner and the services are provided to the computer users by opening the files, folders and frequently used application of users in spoken command mode with voice response.

Methods: In this research article, we have attempted to utilize an Indian spoken language for communication with spoken dialogue system. We have adopted a statistical machine learning algorithm called Hidden Markov Model for development of speech recognition engine. The speaker verification module is developed using fuzzy c-means algorithm. Speech synthesis is carried out using diphone corpus.

Results: The speaker verification module has yielded satisfactory results with average accuracy of 66.2% using FCM algorithm. It is also seen that fundamental frequency and formant frequency carry the distinctive characteristics of speaker verification over Indian spoken language. The vital module of SDS i.e. speech recognition engine is developed by using HMM, a statistical algorithm. It is observed that word accuracy of ASR engine is 78.22 % and 62.31 % for seen and unseen users respectively. The voice response is given to the user in terms of synthesized speech. The audio quality of synthesized speech is measured using the MOS test. The MOS test value is found as 3.8 and 3.6 over two distinct groups of listeners.

Conclusion: In this research paper, we have developed a spoken dialogue system based on Odia language phone set. We have integrated speaker verification module in order to provide additional biometric based security.

Keywords: Spoken dialogue, HMM, fuzzy c-means, man-machine, speech recognition, speech synthesis.

Graphical Abstract