Use your Voice – and Smart Homes will “LISTEN”

Wouldn´t it be convenient to control heating or cooling, lighting, and media anywhere in your home by just using your voice, without any device in your hand? For the elderly and people with disabilities, it would be even more than that: It can provide assistive control of important everyday activities and even save lives, in case of emergencies.

For smart homes: small, robust and locally installed

To develop such a novel smart home functionality, speech technology and signal processing experts from Germany, Greece, and Italy collaborate in the EU project “LISTEN” – “Hands-free Voice-enabled Interface to Web Applications for Smart Home Environments”. They are designing a system enabling robust hands-free large-vocabulary voice-based access to Internet applications in smart homes.

An important function is the use of a microphone array, which is a matchbox-size unit with 8 microphones. EML European Media Laboratory GmbH provide their speech recognition system and refine their tools for the project. For example, the speech recognition can also – in contrast to the current approach of large providers – be installed locally, which is a prerequisite for enforcing strong privacy rules.

Real time speech recognition in four languages

In the mid-term project review meeting the project partners demonstrated the system in four languages (English, German, Greek, and Italian). The EU project officer Alina Suhetzki experienced “LISTEN” by herself. Speaking her commands in English, she switched the lights on and off in a blink. “This was an impressive demonstration”, she said. “A small and smart system that works in real-time with four languages and can also be adapted to further languages.”

“LISTEN” is part of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) program, in the HORIZON 2020 framework. The other project partners are the RWTH Aachen University, Germany, Cedat 85, Italy, and the Greek Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH), who coordinates the project.

EML European Media Laboratory GmbH will present their speech technology from February 21-23, 2017, at the CCW in Berlin, the international conference and trade show for customer communications services. The EML stand is located in Hall 2, C19.

Find more best practice examples for the use of EML speech technology in the brochure “Use your Voice!” http://www.eml.org/deutsch/medien/EML_Best_Practice_eng_web.pdf

For additional information please contact:

Dr Peter Saueressig
Head of Communications
EML European Media Laboratory GmbH
Mathematikon
Berliner Str. 45
69120 Heidelberg
Tel.: +49 (6221) 533245
Email: saueressig@eml.org
www.eml.org

EML European Media Laboratory GmbH
EML European Media Laboratory GmbH was set up as a private IT company by SAP co-founder Klaus Tschira (1940-2015). EML develops software and technologies for automatic speech processing, focusing on the automatic conversion of speech into text (transcription) as used in telephony (speech analytics, voice mail) and mobile applications (voice texting, voice search. www.eml.org
Follow EML on:
Twitter: @EMLvoice
Facebook: /EMLEuropeanMediaLaboratory
Youtube: /EMLVoiceMessaging

http://www.eml.org/deutsch/medien/EML_Best_Practice_eng_web.pdf “Use your Voice!” – best practice examples for the use of EML speech technology
http://www.eml.org/english/media/presse.php?we_objectID=207 EML press release