Few open source speech projects

It's interesting that a lot of activity around speech software happen recently. I'm probably too impatient trying to track everything interesting. Even through ISCA-students added twitter feed recently, their website still needs a lot of care. Hopefully, Voxforge will become such resource one day. There is a growing amount of packages, tools, projects and events.

For example I've got in touch with SEMAINE project lead by DFKI recently, an effort to build a multimodal dialogue system which ca, interact with humans with a virtual character, sustain an interaction with a user for some time and react appropriately to the user's non-verbal behaviour. The sources are available and the new release is expected in December as far as I understood, so I'm definitely looking forward. The interesting thing is that SEMAINE incorporates emotion recognition framework with libSVM as a classifier, such framework would be useful in sphinx4 for example. Actually a lot of news come now from the European research institutes, projects from RWTH or TALP promise a lot.

Another example is that I was pleased to find out that in 2009 there was a rich transcription evaluation. It's interesting why results aren't available still and what was the progress on meeting transcription task since 2007.

Probably I would sleep better if I didn't knew all above :)