The Nature of Speech

Abstract

Man’s amazing ability to communicate through speech sets him apart from other earthly species and is often regarded as a sign of his spirituality. As the most natural form of communication between humans, speech is a subject which has attracted much interest and attention over many years. The structure of speech, its production and perception mechanisms have long occupied linguists, psychologists and physiologists. Scientists and engineers have endeavoured to construct machines which can synthesise and recognise human speech. In recent years, this goal has begun to be realised, though the systems that have been built are still a long way from being able to emulate human performance. Current speech synthesis systems are capable of producing reasonably intelligible though not natural-sounding speech. Automatic speech recognition systems can currently recognise with reasonable accuracy words spoken in isolation from a small vocabulary. Their performance degrades quite significantly, however, when they are required to cope with large vocabularies, continuous speech input and a wide variety of speakers. Nevertheless, the performance of both speech recognition and synthesis systems is improving slowly and steadily with time, and speech systems are now being used in certain commercial applications.

He gave man speech and speech created thought Which is the power of the universe.

P.B. Shelley