84 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
84 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
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Introduction to the Edinburgh Speech Tools {#estintro}
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===========================================
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[TOC]
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The Edinburgh Speech Tools Library is a library of general speech software, written at the Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh.
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The Edinburgh Speech Tools Library is written is C++ and provides a range of
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tools for common tasks found in speech processing. The library provides a
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set of stand alone executable programs and a set of library calls
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which can be linked into user programs.
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Updates and news about the speech tools include releases and bug fixes
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may be found at [Speech Tools website](http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/speech_tools.html)
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Most speech researchers spend a considerable amount of time writing,
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developing and debugging code. In fact, many researchers spend most of
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their time doing this. The sad fact is that most of this time is spent
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on unnecessary tasks - time which could be better spent doing "real"
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research. The library is intended to provide software that
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programmers use day-to-day, and provide this in an easy to use fashion.
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# The Library {#thelibrary}
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The Edinburgh Speech Tools Library has two main parts: a software
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library and a set of programs which use the library.
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A library is a single central place where useful software is kept. A
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UNIX library is a single file (in this case called `libestools.a`)
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which can be linked to an individual program. When writing a program,
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you can call any of the functions in the library, and they will
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automatically be linked into your program when you compile. The key
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point is that you never need look at the library itself or copy the
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code in it. That way you can write small programs, concentrate on the
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algorithms and not have to worry about any infrastructure issues.
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The speech tools also provide a number of utility programs for things
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like playback, sampling rate conversion, file format conversion,
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etc. Usually these programs are just wrap-around executables based on
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standard speech tools library functions.
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## What does the library contain?
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### Speech class
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Includes tracks for storing sets of time aligned coefficients, and waves for
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digitally sampled speech waveforms.
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### Linguistic class
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A comprenhensive system for storing different kinds of linguistic information
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is given. This is based on the Hetrogeneous Relation Graph
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formalism ***CITE***. Feature structures, tress, lists, graphs
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ect can all be represented with the linguistic classes.
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### Audio playback
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Easy to use routines to record and play audio data without any fuss.
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### Signal processing
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Commonly used signal processing algorithms such as including pitch tracking, cepstra and LPC, filtering, fourier analysis etc.
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### Statistical functions
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### Grammars
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### Intonation
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Software support for the Tilt intonation model
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### Speech Recognition
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### Utility Functions and Classes
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Useful classes such as lists, vectors, matrices, strings and functions for
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reading files, parsing command lines etc.
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## Using the speechtools
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Once installed, speech tools can be used either by running the
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exectuable programs or by building your own C++ programs and linking
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to the library.
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Documentation on executable programs is found in [Executable Programs](@ref estexec).
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Instructions on how to build your own programs which use the library
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are found in [Building speech tools](@ref estinstallbuild).
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