SBIR Phase II: Robust Speech-to-Text Messaging

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II research project proposes to develop techniques for the hands-free input of text to mobile devices. Specifically, this project extends the results of the Phase I effort to produce a speech-recognition system for mobile devices and personal appliances that is robust in the presence of background noise. To increase the speech recognition accuracy, four techniques are employed: 1) Spellation where the users have to speak and partially spell the words as they dictate, 2) VoiceTap which requires that, for each character, the user says that character and the following character in the alphabet, 3) Voice Predict where the user has to say the word and input the first character of the word using the keyboard or VoiceTap, and 4) multi-modal speech to text, where the user speaks and uses the keyboard simultaneously. The research effort will focus on developing modules that allow speech to be dictated using a combination of whole words and spelled words. The outcome of the proposed research has significant commercial potential. Because the front end or client-side can be ported to a variety of operating systems and processors, the flexibility of this technology should enable wide licensing of the technology to telecommunication device manufacturers. The mobile wireless industry is very large and growing industry, and multi-modal input technology is important to mobile customers who demand more efficient and accurate methods for communication. Improvements in accuracy could be very significant and would potentially have widespread applicability.