[Kaldi-developers] Kaldi question

[Jessica H. <je...@su...>]

Dear Kaldi team,

I am a faculty member at the University of Sussex. I am planing a study and
would like to know if Kaldi is the right software to use.

I study child word learning. I am planning to record an adult and child
talking about objects. (The adult will be a lab member and know not to speak
at the same time as the child and there will be as little background noise
as possible.) The child will be about 3 years old, but I can go up to 4
years if that will be better for the software. I would like to train the
software on the adult input to the child (what the adult said) and then give
it the child speech. I would like an index of how similar the child speech
was to the adult speech. For example, if the adult is teaching the child the
word ³apple² and says ³apple² 12 times, when the child finally says ³apple²
how similar is that word to the adult speech the child heard?

My colleague told me that speech recognition software works by having a
threshold of similarity. For example, when I tell my mobile phone ³call
home² the software compares what I said to what I have said before and if it
is similar enough (above threshold) it will recognise my speech. I¹m hopeful
that I could use the same kind of principle here (how similar is the child¹s
speech to the adult speech (what was said before), but I would want a
numerical value instead of just knowing if it was above or below threshold.

Can Kaldi handle child and adult speech in this way?

Thank you for your time.
~Jessica

********************************
Dr. Jessica S. Horst
Senior Lecturer in Psychology

University of Sussex
School of Psychology
Brighton BN1 9QH
United Kingdom

Email: je...@su...
Tel: +44 (0)1273 87 3084
Lab: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/wordlab