One of the goals of AusKidTalk is to collect different kinds of speech. And certain sounds, such as r and th typically don’t come until children are five or six years old.Ĭhildren also don’t have a fully developed vocabulary and may not use correct grammar or sentence structure - something that Ahmed says technology doesn’t recognise. Linguists and psychologists, meanwhile, will use it to better understand how children develop their speech and language.Īhmed says young children can struggle with consonant clusters - so clown becomes cown and brick becomes bick. She reached out to like-minded researchers in Sydney and Melbourne, and AusKidTalk was born.Īhmed and her fellow engineers will use the database to develop new speech recognition systems for younger users. Unable to find a database of children’s voices to support her research, Ahmed decided to build one. And with speech, accents make a huge difference … so something built for American accents might not necessarily work well with Australian ones.” “There are huge databases for adult speech but for children’s speech, there are not that many databases around the world. “The biggest issue that I have faced in my research is that we don’t have children’s speech databases that we can use in developing these tools,” Ahmed said. She’s been studying children’s speech for more than a decade, coming up with new tools and technology to help Australian kids. University of New South Wales electrical engineer Dr Beena Ahmed researches the use of signal processing to understand speech. Beena Ahmed is an expert in the use of signal processing to understand speech. The project’s team of engineers, linguists, psychologists and speech pathologists are creating a unique database of Australian kids’ voices, and they say the benefits could extend to new learning and speech therapy tools for children. But AusKidTalk - a new joint project of five universities - aims to change that. Until now, the speech recognition software behind virtual assistants like Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri has relied on a database of adult voices. Researchers are hoping to capture the voices of hundreds of Australian children in a bid to improve speech recognition for young tech users. A new Australian project hopes to change that.

Speech recognition software struggles to understand children’s voices.

Australian siri text to speech