What Our Voices Reveal About Us

So I might jump straight into this one with a question so that our listeners get a good understanding of what we're going to be talking about today straight from the expert.

What exactly is speech processing?

Speech processing is trying to decode the information present in what we say, what we communicate.

And so when I say what we say, I'm not referring to just the letters that are decoded from our speech, but also things like how we're feeling, where we're speaking.

So the noise, removing all that noise, trying to understand the emotions we are trying to convey, and also trying to decode even simple things like what language we are speaking in.

Where would people have maybe come across speech processing already in their lives? Maybe they don't realize it's happening.

speech processing has been around for quite a while the oldest would have been the talkies that we had you know where movies where you actually had sound in a movie that was a huge thing and we were actually using a microphone just like we're using in this podcast to record a speech signal and then translating it into something electronically that can be superimposed over a picture So that's the original, you know, and we speech processing, we're going to be using it over here to enhance the audio quality of the speech.

Any noises that we produce are going to be removed out.

So anytime we make a mobile call or a phone call, we're using speech.

The speech signal is converted into a series of bits and and sent over copper or a mobile phone encoded so that there's no error.

And the most one that people now associate with speech processing is voice assistance.

So whenever we talk to Siri or Google and tell it to give us directions to the closest restaurant.

People might also associate with ChatGPT.

Would that be correct or is that a different field?

No, in ChatGPT, when we use the voice to enter in our input, we're using speech processing that is converted like all the other applications into text, which then ChatGPT works with.

Right.

Is speech hard to decode?

Yes, it is.

Because there's just too much variability.

I mean, even here, the two of us, you sound very different from me.

It's not just how we sound, it's how we talk as well, too.

Our accents, the way we produce different sounds.

It's...

There's just a lot of variability.

Even an individual can have variability from one day to another day, one time of the day to another time of the day.