Ericsson Eurolab Deutschland GmbH, Nuremburg Research & Development Radiocommunication, speech processing group
Ericsson is one of the biggest telecommunication companies with about 90,000 employees operating worldwide in more than 100 countries. The research and development plant in Germany consists of about 700 people where about 160 are working at the site in Nuremberg. The work in Nuremberg is focussing on mobile communication. Within this field, the speech processing group concentrates on speech coding for GSM, the application of speech recognition and methods for acoustic echo cancellation. Our team consists of 5 people working on speech recognition: two of these researchers have Ph.D.s in this area. The main task is the design of recognisers for practical applications of speech recognition. The algorithms as well as the know-how are transferred to the different business units. A short list of the features of the applications we are working on: connected word recognition keyword spotting partly speaker independent (commands, digits,...) partly speaker dependent (personal phonebook) noise robustness with hands-free control in a car as the worst condition barge-in (speech output interruptible by speech input) limited resources of memory and computational performance (1 DSP) single channel recording (but there is interest in comparing 1- and 2-channel results).
Ericsson provides the industrial edge to this project and leads the application work of theme 4.
Theme 4 will also involve IDIAP and Sheffield. Before this, Ericsson will work with other partners, particularly Bochum and Patras, on auditory processing for its applications.