Speech Technology for Information Access: a South African Case Study.
Etienne Barnard, Marelie Hattingh Davel, Gerhard B. Van Huyssteen · 2010
Telephone-based information access has the potential to de-liver a significant positive impact in the developing world. We discuss some of the most important issues that must be ad-dressed in order to realize this potential, including matters re-lated to resource development, automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech systems, and user-interface design. Although our main focus has been on the eleven official languages of South Africa, we believe that many of these same issues will be relevant for the application of speech technology through-out the developing world. Index Terms: spoken language technology for develop-ment, resource-scarce languages