Speech Group

The Speech Group (formerly the Realization Group) conducted research in the areas of algorithms, architectures, and systems for speech and audio signal processing and pattern recognition. In the 1990s the emphasis of this group's work gradually became the application of these areas of study to problems in spoken language processing, and particularly in robust automatic speech recognition.

The Speech Group worked closely both with other groups within ICSI and with several faculty members from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department within UC Berkeley.

Key research areas of the Speech Group included auditory-inspired signal processing, statistical modeling, rich transcription of natural and impromptu meetings, and rich transcription of broadcast and conversational telephone speech.

The Speech Group was led by Steven Wegmann. In addition to his work at ICSI, Wegmann has worked at industrial research laboratories on problems in speech processing for nearly two decades, holding positions at Dragon Systems, Lernout & Hauspie, VoiceSignal Technologies, Nuance Communications, and Cisco Systems. Earlier in his career, he was a mathematician who specialized in algebraic topology. He obtained his doctorate in mathematics at the University of Warwick while he was a Marshall Scholar.

We have made public the results of the Microsoft Diarization project for the years 2007 and 2009. Please include in the access request how you plan to use this data.

Read about specific projects of the Speech Group.