In this introduction, the first video tells you about the background that you need in order to do well on this course. You’ll get the most out of this course if you know a little bit already about either speech (e.g., phonetics), sound in general (including music), engineering, or computer science. If you don’t have any of those backgrounds, you should talk to the lecturer to discuss whether to attempt this course.
The second video sets the scene for the course, with a high-level discussion of human communication via speech.
The remaining videos start to answer the questions “What exactly is speech? How can we inspect it? What tools and methods are available?” We’ll need to start with sound itself, because even a tiny bit of knowledge about acoustics will provide a lot of insight about speech. Then we focus on the production of speech and how that explains the acoustic properties we observe in speech signals.
If, after completing this module, you are still trying to decide if this is the course for you, browse some of the later modules which will give you an idea of how difficult it gets. You could also watch this video about a nice application of text-to-speech technology.