Exploring infrastructure for Dutch speech recognition

ASR systems that have become available on the market recently such as Whisper, seem to provide overwhelmingly accurate transcription of speech. But how do these systems perform under atypical conditions?  For example, in the case of dialects, children or elderly speech or speech from non-native Dutch speakers? What happens if there are multiple speakers, cross talk and background noises? And, what to do if you want to transcribe very large amounts of speech data? What's the best way to handle this in a more (infra)structural way? 

In this seminar, we will show examples from different application areas and discuss practical, operational, and strategic aspects of:

• The necessity of making highly quality (Dutch) speech recognition engines available in research and educational context, e.g., to transcribe speech from lectures, interviews or meetings to text.
• Whether it is important or not that speech recognition engines can be upgraded when better engines or models become available, or that different versions of models can be selected for specific tasks (e.g., specific types of speech).
• How open standards can be applied and ‘explainability’ can be fostered (how are models created, using which data sets, performance specifications) as much as possible.

This seminar has not the aim to facilitate research on speech technology, rather it addresses the use of existing speech technology solutions, and how this can be (further) optimized: let's move together towards sustainable solutions for research and education!

Program

Chair: Annette Langedijk (SURF)

Note: The language of the meeting will be English.

For whom?

The event is of particular interest to: 

• Researchers, educators and support staff from various disciplines interested in the application of automatic speech recognition
• Research & education infrastructure providers

Location

SURF Utrecht (Kantoren Hoog Overborch - Hoog Catharijne) 
Moreelsepark 48 
3511 EP Utrecht 
Route description
 

Organisation

SURF in cooperation with Stichting Open Spraaktechnologie.