14th September 2017

Prague.tv: Czechs taking lead in voice recognition

Czech scientists are at the forefront of developing voice recognition and artificial intelligence. A team from Brno is cooperating with the US Defense Department and Facebook, Raymond Johnston writes for Prague.tv.

The US Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is trying to improve the technology used to decipher poor audio recordings, such as intercepted chatter from suspected terrorists. DARPA is getting help from the information technology faculty of the Brno Institute of Technology (VUT-Brno). 

"We did a project called RATS which deals with speech recognition, language and keyword detection. It was important for machines to be able to recognize speech from very bad transmission channels such as amateur radio stations where the quality was horrible,” voice analysis team member Jan Černocký told daily Hospodářské noviny (HN). RATS stands for Robust Automatic Transcription of Speech.

“At the beginning there is a common human conversation, and we are trying to extract as much information as possible,” Černocký added.

The work in the science laboratory is intended to have eventual applications in the commercial sphere.

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Members of the American Chamber of Commerce in the Czech Republic