This talk will give an overview of the Natural Speech Technology (NST) project. NST started in 2011, and is a 5 year collaboration between the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) at the University of Edinburgh, the Speech Group at the University of Cambridge and The Speech and Hearing Research Group (SpandH), University of Sheffield. It has the aim of making speech technology perform more naturally, approaching human levels of reliability, adaptability and conversational richness. In this talk I'll give an overview of the project, including our core work on speech recognition and synthesis, and the development of applications concerning speech-driven assistive technology, media archiving, and the development of life-logging functionality.
Steve Renals is Professor of Speech Technology and Director of the Institute for Language, Cognition, and Communication at the University of Edinburgh. He has over 150 publications in speech and language processing, and has led several large projects in the field, including the AMI and AMIDA Integrated Projects. He is co-editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing, an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing and a member of the ISCA Advisory Council.