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