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Increasingly in court cases the recorded voice of a perpetrator has to be compared with that of a suspect. Research on speaker characteristics carried out by/under Prof. Nolan has directly contributed to the work of those offering forensic speech services commercially or developing relevant speech processing software. Impact arises from seminal ideas such as LTF (Long Term Formant) analysis, and from the 100-speaker `DyViS' accent-matched database. The latter has directly enabled: the testing of an automatic speaker recognition system preparatory to its incorporation into forensic casework; the development of speaker recognition and speaker separation software; the adoption of systematic `voice quality' analysis; and the availability for casework of population statistics on pitch and disfluencies. Public engagement has raised awareness of the possibilities and limitations of speaker identification in legal and general audiences.
Research in robust speech enhancement and audio-visual processing has led to impact on a range of different fronts:
(i) Collaboration with CSR, a leading $1 billion consumer electronics company, has shaped its R&D research agenda in speech enhancement, has inspired ideas for new product improvements, and has helped establish Belfast as an audio research centre of excellence within the company.
(ii) Our technology has changed the strategic R&D direction of a company delivering healthcare monitoring systems, with potential for multi-million pound savings in NHS budgets.
(iii) Audio-visual speech processing research has led to a proof-of-concept biometric system, Liopa: a novel, robust and convenient person authentication and verification technology exploiting lip and facial movements (www.liopa.co.uk). A start-up company is in an advanced stage of being established to commercialise this product. The product and commercialisation strategy was awarded First Prize in the 2013 NISP Connect £25K entrepreneurship competition in the Digital Media and Software category. The first commercial partner for Liopa has been engaged.
(iv) A system-on-chip implementation of a version of our speech recognition engine, which was developed through an EPSRC project, was awarded first prize in the High Technology Award in the 2010 NISP £25K Awards competition, and contributed to the founding of a spin-out company, Analytics Engines (www.analyticsengines.com).
Edinburgh's research in multilingual speech synthesis has had clinical and commercial impact, and has resulted in a large and diverse community of users.
Clinical applications: Our research has enabled the construction of natural-sounding, personalised synthetic voices from recordings of speech from people with disordered speech due to conditions such as Parkinson's disease or Motor Neurone Disease. These synthetic voices are used in assistive technology devices that allow sufferers of these conditions to communicate more easily and effectively.
Commercial take-up: Our research has achieved commercial impact through the licensing of technology components, and through the activities of start-up companies.
Community of users: The Festival Speech Synthesis System (v2.1 released in November 2010) is a complete open-source text-to-speech system released under an unrestrictive X11-type license, and is distributed as part of many major Linux distributions.
Speech Graphics Ltd is a spinout company from the University of Edinburgh, building on research into the animation of talking heads during 2006-2011. Speech Graphics' technology is the first high fidelity lip-sync solution driven by audio. Speech Graphics market a multi-lingual, scalable solution to audio-driven animation that uses acoustic analysis and muscle dynamics to drive the faces of computer game characters accurately matching the words and emotion in the audio. The industry-leading technology developed by Speech Graphics has been used to animate characters in computer games developed by Supermassive games in 2012 and in music videos for artists such as Kanye West in 2013.
This impact case study provides evidence of economic impacts of our research because:
i) a spin-out company, Speech Graphics Ltd, has been created, established its viability, and gained international recognition;
ii) the computer games industry and the music video industry have adopted a new technology founded on University of Edinburgh research into a novel technique to synthesize lip motion trajectories using Trajectory Hidden Markov Models; and
iii) this led to the improvement of the process of cost-effective creation of computer games which can be sold worldwide because their dialogue can be more easily specialised into different human languages with rapid creation of high-quality facial animation replacing a combination of motion capture and manual animation.
Stroke and other forms of brain injury often result in debilitating communication impairments. For example, patients with acquired apraxia of speech (AOS) experience difficulties that affect their capacity to verbally express thoughts and needs. Such individuals have benefitted from the development of a novel computerised treatment — "Sheffield Word" (SWORD). Patients who took part in clinical trials showed improvements in aspects of speech that were impaired after stroke. SWORD is now used by healthcare teams worldwide, providing benefits to a large patient population. The SWORD computerised treatment is convenient to use at home, fosters users' autonomy, and delivers higher treatment doses than possible through traditional clinical sessions. Clinicians who treat AOS have also benefitted through education, training and access to online materials about SWORD which were provided by the research team.
Nearly every large-vocabulary speech recognition system in current use employs outputs from fundamental research carried out in the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering (DoEng) on adaptation of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). One example of the commercial application of these outputs is their use on the Microsoft Windows desktop for both the command and control functions and the dictation functions. Approximately one billion copies of Windows have been shipped since 2008. Other examples show the outputs used in the automatic transcription of a wide range of types of data. [text removed for publication]
Essex research on language variation has been central to the development of the best-practice Guidelines for Language Analysis for Determination of Origin (LADO) — an instrument used to determine whether an asylum seeker's claim of origin is genuine. Professor Peter Patrick has provided expert guidance to a legal team in a Scottish asylum appeal — the verdict of which was favourable and created a new precedent in Scottish law. He has submitted over 60 expert reports to UK tribunals and appeals courts since 2008. He has also disseminated expertise to professionals and has been instrumental in establishing dialogue between academics and a range of practitioners.
The impact is primarily in Public Health. It mainly concerns the adoption of and demand for a speech research technology, Electropalatography (EPG), for clinical diagnosis and treatment of speech disorders. Our continuing long-term and interdisciplinary research into EPG has increased our impact in this census period from the previous RAE2008, during which time the UOA had already been awarded a Queen's Anniversary Prize (2002) for working towards the clinical application of speech science.
Financial Support from the charitable sector and the NHS for the training of classroom assistants and SLTs in EPG therapy is highlighted, along with user testimonials, unmet demand, and small-scale provision of the therapy.
The psycholinguistic framework for research and practice developed by Stackhouse and Wells is now a key component of the majority of UK speech and language therapy courses at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. In addition to influencing the design and delivery of course curricula in the UK, Europe, Australia, South Africa and USA, the framework is used in continuing professional development for speech and language therapists (SLTs), special needs teachers, and with parents. The resultant impact on clinical and educational practice, the assessment of children and the planning of therapy interventions can be seen across the spectrum of persisting speech difficulties, including those related to dyspraxia, dysarthria, dyslexia, cleft palate, Down Syndrome, stammering, specific speech and language impairments.
GSM and 3G mobile systems do not currently support end-to-end security in the form of encryption for speech. Research at Surrey has created new speech technology which allows complete end-to-end security via the mobile speech channel. This worldwide first secure-from-eavesdropping mobile phone system is available anywhere there is mobile coverage.
A Surrey spin out, MulSys Ltd., has licensed the technology to security agencies and is now developing a mass market product.