Exchanges for SPEech ReseArch aNd TechnOlogies

The ESPERANTO project aims at pushing speech processing technologies to their next step in order to enable the diffusion of these technologies in European SMEs and to maximize and securize their use in the civil society for forensic, health or education.

The ESPERANTO consortium forsees that the next generation of artificial intelligence algorithms for speech processing should :1.be more accessible : via a larger number of spoken languages, and for applications where resources are strongly limited (health, education, robotics…);2.integrate a human in the loop to guaranty a higher usability and ease of deployment and maintenance;3.be explainable in order to enable sensitive applications related to forensic or health and contribute to personal data preservation by detecting and characterizing existing biases due to the data-driven nature of current speech technologies.ESPERANTO intends to lead the scientific community by releasing evaluation metrics, protocols and standards that will boost the development and evaluation of this new generation of algorithms.

To achieve this ambitious goal, the ESPERANTO project gathers a large and trans-sectorial community of experts in speech related applications such as speech transcription, separation, enhancement, translation, understanding and speaker recognition and diarization to transfer knowledge, organize, produce and standardize resources with the aim of catalyzing and cross-pollenizing this area.The main goals of the ESPERANTO project are:- support the development of open-source tools that will encourage fast developement, exchanges and reproducibility;- produce tutorials and competitive baselines on various topics of speech processing in order to boost the fostering of new speech-AI students, researchers and engineers;- facilitate the collection and sharing of linguistic and speech resources through standards;- organize workshops to progress on the speech technologies and favor tranfer of knowledge.