About to start research on speech recognition

[darkdog]

I'm currently working as an electrical engineer and not enjoying it, so I decided to quit my job and go to graduate school. Tomorrow is my last day of work and needless to say, I'm excited as hell!

My major will be electrical engineering and my area of research will be speech recognition. It's a very mathy area and I'm kind of nerdy that way, so it's right up my alley. However, I also owe some credit to alldeaf.com. Last year, I read a thread here about a deaf student's parents having to sue the school district to get CART services for their daughter. That got me to thinking how improved speech recognition technology could be helpful to not only the deaf (including my wife), but also society in general. If the technology improves enough, it could lead to automatic captioning of anything on the spot without requiring someone to type it out. Anyone who's tried to use this technology knows it can be inaccurate (especially in noisy situations or with a mumbling speaker) and there's a lot of room for improvement.

So after thinking about it for a while, I decided it's what I want to do and I'm finally going for it. Thanks for the inspiration and wish me luck!

 

[Bottesini]

Good luck to you! I hope all your ideas work out.

 

[Dennis S.]

It is very challenging, but hopefully it'll be rewarding too.

You'll probably also wants to take some classes in lingusitics and phonetics. Speech recognition is great for recognizing unique words, but words that sound alike, or said in various ways, or depend on context for meaning, are all issues faced today.

 

[deafclimber]

cool... best of luck !

 

[darkdog]

Thanks guys! My curriculum does include a fair amount of linguistics and phonetics along with a bunch of math and signal processing.

Dennis, do you have experience working in that field?