Welcome to the AnTon project's website. AnTon is a vocal tract robot that imitates human speech processes. The design and construction of the robot was part of a PhD research project carried out at the Speech and Hearing research group of the University of Sheffield. AnTon was used in vowel production experiments to establish links between energy requirements of speech articulation and speech production behaviour. The work is documented in the form of several publications, which are listed in the Publications section.

It is hoped that speech variation and energetics modeling will help to improve the performance of applications in speech technology, which currently struggle with the natural variation that occurs in speech. In order to establish a quantitative relation between variation and speaking energy, detailed data are needed. Ethical and practical considerations make it difficult or even impossible to collect precise data from humans; AnTon was created as a solution to this problem.

AnTon was designed using human anatomy as the guideline. The model's functionality arises solely from that 'biomimetic' principle. By imitating structure rather than function, AnTon inherently incorporates a system that might be suboptimal for the task of speech production. This is not a flaw, but necessary in order to study speech behaviour which evolved as an additional function of an organ which serves other primary functions such as breathing and mastication.

Current state of the project:
With the successful submission of my thesis, the initial project is now finished. However, should you be interested in any aspect of AnTon, please do not hesitate to contact me. It is expected that AnTon, or improved versions based on AnTon, will be used in future projects. Links to such projects will be posted here:

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