Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
62 results found in Speech Technology.
- Grid-Based Navigation (Grid Navigation, Grid Cursor Control)
- A speech-controlled cursor positioning technique that divides the screen into numbered regions, allowing users to select progressively smaller areas by speaking numbers until the cursor reaches the ta…
- JSML (Java Speech Markup Language)
- An XML-based markup language developed by Sun Microsystems that provides directives for controlling the output of speech synthesis engines. JSML allows developers to specify pronunciation details incl…
- Landmark Detection (Acoustic Landmark Detection, Stevens Landmark Theory)
- Landmark detection is a speech analysis method based on Kenneth Stevens' acoustic model of speech production, which identifies perceptually significant points in the acoustic signal where listeners ex…
- Listening Window
- The interval during which a voice assistant or speech-recognition system actively captures user audio after being activated (by wake word or button press). A short or fixed listening window causes pre…
- Math-to-Speech (Mathematical Speech Generation, Math Speech)
- The process of converting mathematical notation into spoken language that can be rendered by text-to-speech engines or read aloud by screen readers. Math-to-speech is significantly more complex than r…
- Mispronunciation Detection (Pronunciation Error Detection, Mispronunciation Diagnosis)
- Mispronunciation detection is the automated process of identifying errors in a speaker's pronunciation by comparing their speech production against a target or expected utterance. In assistive technol…
- Natural Speech Output (Recorded Speech, Digitized Speech)
- Speech output produced from digital recordings of actual human speakers, as opposed to artificially generated synthetic speech. Natural speech output preserves the prosody, intonation, emotion, and vo…
- Neural Vocoder
- A deep-learning model that synthesises audio waveforms from intermediate acoustic representations such as mel-spectrograms or discrete speech units. Examples include HiFi-GAN, WaveNet, WaveGlow, and S…
- Non-Verbal Vocalization (Non-Speech Vocalization, Vocal Gesture, Non-speech Vocalisation, Non-Speech Vocalisation)
- A sound produced by the voice that is not a spoken word, such as a sustained vowel sound ("Ahhhhh"), hum, or other vocal noise. In assistive technology and alternative input contexts, non-verbal vocal…
- Perceptual Linear Prediction (PLP, PLP Coefficients)
- Perceptual Linear Prediction (PLP) is an acoustic feature extraction technique used in speech processing that models human auditory perception. PLP analysis applies psychoacoustic principles including…
- Re-speaking (Respeaking, Speech-to-Text Relay)
- A captioning technique in which a trained operator listens to a speaker and repeats (re-speaks) their words clearly into a high-quality microphone in a controlled environment, allowing automatic speec…
- Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)
- A recurrent neural network (RNN) is a type of artificial neural network designed to process sequential data by maintaining an internal state (memory) that captures information from previous inputs in …
- Repair Mechanism (Conversational Repair)
- In conversational interface design, a feature that helps the user and the system recover from misrecognition, ambiguity, or misunderstanding — for example, clarification prompts ("Did you mean the [X]…
- SAPI (Speech Application Programming Interface, Microsoft SAPI)
- The Speech Application Programming Interface (SAPI) is a Microsoft Windows API that enables applications to use speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis. SAPI provides a standardized interface …
- Semantically Unpredictable Sentences (SUS, SUS Test)
- A standardised method for evaluating speech intelligibility in which listeners are presented with sentences that are grammatically correct but semantically meaningless, such as "A polite art jumps ben…
- Speaker Adaptation (Voice Adaptation, Speaker-Adaptive Training, Voice Personalization)
- Speaker adaptation is the process of adjusting an existing automatic speech recognition (ASR) system — usually one trained on a large, demographically broad corpus of able-bodied speakers — to a parti…
- Speaker Diarisation (Speaker Diarization, Speaker Segmentation)
- The automatic process of segmenting an audio recording by speaker identity — answering "who spoke when" — and labelling each segment. A critical pre-requisite for accessible transcripts of multi-voice…
- Spectrogram (Sonogram, Spectral Display)
- A spectrogram is a visual representation of the frequency spectrum of a signal as it varies over time, typically showing time on the horizontal axis, frequency on the vertical axis, and intensity repr…
- Speech Composer (Speech Generation, Message Composition Engine)
- A software component in AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) systems that takes user input — whether typed text, selected symbols, or telegraphic phrases — and processes it for spoken outp…
- Speech Diversity (Diverse Speech, Non-Typical Speech)
- The full range of ways human speech varies from the narrow 'typical' speech on which most speech-AI systems are trained and benchmarked. Speech diversity includes people who stutter, d/Deaf and Hard-o…