Echo Cancelling

2016-02-21T19:09:16.818000Z

An incremental dialogue system concurrently listens and speaks. That's how it's supposed to be, but there is one problem: on the most basic level, the ASR does not know whether the TTS is speaking and hence will "tune in" to its own words and listen to itself. What's worse, a polite incremental dialogue system will stop speaking when interrupted (or speak up to keep the turn). This may either lead to the system feeling interrupted all the time (by itself), or speaking louder and louder in a positive feedback loop.

So far, I have relied on users wearing headphones (ideally headsets) which decouple audio out and audio in. However, this does not work well for demos (as nobody can hear the system apart from the user). Linux to the rescue: try

pactl load-module module-echo-cancel aec_method=webrtc
PULSE_PROP="filter.want=echo-cancel" java inpro.apps.SimplReco ...

to enable self-echo-cancellation. Of course, this has some impact on ASR performance and at least on my machine leads to 100% cpu usage, but it reduces the problem a lot!

New Release!

2013-12-17T15:01:50.767000Z

After a very successful tutorial last week in Bielefeld, I've finally decided to push InproTK to it's 1.0 release, and to also move our sourcecode management to Git. I'm thankful to Sourceforge for hosting us for so long, but our sourcecode is moving on to Bitbucket, thanks to their free academic license.

Interspeech Tutorial!

2013-05-05T15:22:30.057000Z

There will be an Interspeech Tutorial on incremental spoken dialogue processing, held by Timo Baumann and David Schlangen, that will be largely based on InproTK. Come visit us to learn more and to start using InproTK!

Video of InproTK in Action

2012-09-05T13:48:31.875000Z

A [student project on spoken dialogue systems](http://nats-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/view/ProSDS1112/) at the [University of Hamburg](http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de) has used InproTK as part of a hybrid dialogue system. The system combines a standard, non-incremental system (based on DialogOS) with an incremental mode (built with InproTK, of course) for positioning puzzle pieces. it turns out that positioning is much easier and more flexible in the incremental mode. Also, it's quite amazing how they integrated the two systems (different ASRs, different DM, different everything) into one application. Well done! Their video is available on [YouTube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sXh2L8Rjkc).

Repository import

2012-06-15T06:41:31.709000Z

I've finally been able to import the InproTK code from our restricted SVN to Sourceforge. This was difficult because the code was living along with documents, code, and other stuff not meant for public circulation (especially not including all the revision information). It turns out that selectively exporting from a subversion repository is difficult as soon as you have started to rename things. To be precise, you'll have to implement it yourself, or use my implementation svncleaner.pl (which I'll upload shortly).

InproTK poster at SDCTD 2012

2012-06-06T21:49:27.027000Z

Tomorrow, David will be presenting our Poster which describes the upcoming release (also due tomorrow). Right now I'm still wrestling with GIT to get our code in shape. I don't want to upload it without the full history, but I'm forced to make sure that there aren't even traces of some files which we can't/don't want to release. Anyone who's very intimate with GIT who's interested in helping?

System demonstration at ACL

2012-05-11T11:50:39.589000Z

Our (David Schlangen's and Timo Baumann's) system demonstration of the incremental speech synthesis component that is part of InproTK was accepted for demonstration at ACL. We'll really have to get the code in shape before that can happen. The code for all demonstrations is in the inprotk code repositories, in src/demo.