Adding sound to silence
The SYNFACE project developed an artificial talking face derived from speech as a lip-reading support for hearing disabled users of voice channels. In order to control and synchronise the speech movements of the face with the incoming telephone speech signal, a phoneme recogniser was also produced. The developed prototype comprises a phoneme, which is a speech sound, a recogniser and a visual speech synthesiser that is the artificial talking face. The recogniser enables identification of speech sounds and a face synthesiser that allows recreation of their articulation. The user can actually hear the speech of the person at the other end of the line, while synchonisation capabilities of the novel system allow visualisation of lip movements on the user's device. This innovative approach can be adopted by any telephone device and it is very cost-effective in comparison to video or text telephony. Although the current system comes in three languages, English, Dutch and Swedish, it can be easily adjusted to articulate phonemes in various languages. Moreover, the SYNFACE prototype has other potential applications including information kiosks especially in noisy environments, language teaching systems and animated characters. For more information click at: http://www.speech.kth.se/synface/(opens in new window).
