Welcome to Speech Processing!
In this first module/week, we will first give an overview of the course with a view to establishing the relevance of phonetics to speech technology (i.e., text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition). We’ll start to touch upon the following foundational questions in spoken language processing: What is text? What does it represent? How can you describe speech to a computer? How does that relate to phonetics?
After the course overview, we will start to make the connection between text and speech by looking at some visual representations of speech and relating them to the articulatory changes that take place in your mouth to create various speech sounds. We’ll also begin working with the speech annotation software Praat to annotate and analyse speech sound waves. We’ll briefly introduce the IPA and the concepts that relate the grid structure of the chart to the anatomical structures of human vocal tracts.
Since people are still choosing courses, we won’t assume that you will have watched this week’s videos before the Thursday lecture. But if you are certain you are taking this course, we may want to get ahead on that (and on next week’s content).
Please note there is no lab in week 1! The first lab session will be in week 2 and will cover material from module 1. In general labs for a module are in the week after the lecture.
Lecture Slides
Lecture 1 slides (google slides) [updated 19/9/2023]