Speech recognition with built in noise and chatter immunity

Two obstacles to expanding speech technology application domains are the limited discrimination of intentional speech from (i) background noise, and (ii) incidental interfering speech, or background chatter. Since 1997, our company IC Tech has been engaged in developing technologies and solutions for speech enhancement towards better speech intelligibility and speech recognition accuracy in noisy environments. Our technologies have already been channeled to the marketplace, especially to automotive telematics applications. With this effort, we are proposing to apply our technology and know-how in noise cancellation and speech applications to develop speech recognition systems that are capable of reliable and robust performance in very noisy and chaotic military environments. Our target application is for command and control of vehicles and machines in Submarine Portable Ship Control Unit (PSCU) and Submarine Command Workstations. Our extensive use of commercial off-the-shelf technologies will keep the cost of the system well under $25,000 per copy, even in small quantities. Our Phase I effort will be geared towards investigating the optimum selections for microphone type and placement, noise cancellation technology, and automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine for this application. During the option phase, we will define the grammar and design and demonstrate the advantages of our system.