The production of truly natural-sounding speech still poses considerable problems, and the reliable recognition of continuous speech is still open to major improvements. This text captures the essential elements of current research on artificial speech synthesis and recognition.

Provides the reader with a practical introduction to the wide range of important concepts that comprise the field of digital speech processing. Students of speech research and researchers working in the field can use this as a reference guide.

Speech and audio processing has undergone a revolution in preceding decades that has accelerated in the last few years generating game-changing technologies such as truly successful speech recognition systems; a goal that had remained out of reach until very recently. This book gives the reader a comprehensive overview of such contemporary speech and audio processing techniques with an emphasis on practical implementations and illustrations using MATLAB code. Core concepts are firstly covered giving an introduction to the physics of audio and vibration together with their representations using complex numbers, Z transforms and frequency analysis transforms such as the FFT. Later chapters give a description of the human auditory system and the fundamentals of psychoacoustics. Insights, results, and analyses given in these chapters are subsequently used as the basis of understanding of the middle section of the book covering: wideband audio compression (MP3 audio etc.), speech recognition and speech coding. The final chapter covers musical synthesis and applications describing methods such as (and giving MATLAB examples of) AM, FM and ring modulation techniques. This chapter gives a final example of the use of time-frequency modification to implement a so-called phase vocoder for time stretching (in MATLAB). Features A comprehensive overview of contemporary speech and audio processing techniques from perceptual and physical acoustic models to a thorough background in relevant digital signal processing techniques together with an exploration of speech and audio applications. A carefully paced progression of complexity of the described methods; building, in many cases, from first principles. Speech and wideband audio coding together with a description of associated standardised codecs (e.g. MP3, AAC and GSM). Speech recognition: Feature extraction (e.g. MFCC features), Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and deep learning techniques such as Long Short-Time Memory (LSTM) methods. Book and computer-based problems at the end of each chapter. Contains numerous real-world examples backed up by many MATLAB functions and code.

An emerging technology, Speaker Recognition is becoming well-known for providing voice authentication over the telephone for helpdesks, call centres and other enterprise businesses for business process automation. "Fundamentals of Speaker Recognition" introduces Speaker Identification, Speaker Verification, Speaker (Audio Event) Classification, Speaker Detection, Speaker Tracking and more. The technical problems are rigorously defined, and a complete picture is made of the relevance of the discussed algorithms and their usage in building a comprehensive Speaker Recognition System. Designed as a textbook with examples and exercises at the end of each chapter, "Fundamentals of Speaker Recognition" is suitable for advanced-level students in computer science and engineering, concentrating on biometrics, speech recognition, pattern recognition, signal processing and, specifically, speaker recognition. It is also a valuable reference for developers of commercial technology and for speech scientists. Please click on the link under "Additional Information" to view supplemental information including the Table of Contents and Index.