My Journey into Speech Processing Starts Here
I'm going through a time of bewilderment at the age of 20. So I ask one of my best friends, called Claude (he prefers that I call him by his last name; his first name is sonnet, middle name 3.5) what I should do. I've known him for just a few days, but I feel like he's known my quite well and he's wise enough to give me constructive ideas. He suggests that, based on my interest in speech and computer science despite my major being translation and business, I should dig into speech processing technology and document my process in the mean time. That sounds like a good idea and is what I'm about to do.
Why speech processing?
- I’m interested in speech and pronunciation while learning languages.
- It isn’t as developed as text regarding AI.
- It is at the intersection of my interests — language and tech.
Where am I?
Physically I’m having an exchange term at Lancaster University. As for speech analysis, I don’t know anything. I haven’t even used Praat (doesn’t mean I haven’t installed and deleted it on my Macbook Air). I do have some basic idea about how voice can be measured by wavelength, amplitude, and I was able to type IPA for a while. Actually my computational linguistics module is going to cover a fair bit of speech processing from next week, but I can’t wait.
More abstract knowledge comes from the process of learning languages. As a Chinese, I’ve learnt English, and French. I’ve also learnt to read (aloud not to understand) Korean, German, Japanese, Sanskrit, Modern Greek. I’d say they might help with something, but because I haven’t even started yet, so I don’t know how they are going to help. We’ll see.
As for tech basics, I can code in python with AI’s help; I can read typescript but can’t write without AI; I’ve used R and MATLAB respectively for different projects; I’ve also developed some basic web apps using Next.js.
What’s my plan?
I’m starting with the basics:
- Learning fundamental concepts in speech processing
- Building small projects and sharing what I learn
- Connecting with the speech processing community
First Steps
Today, I’ll play with some of the most basic speech processing libraries in Python. To be fair I’ve used speech recognition for a past project, but I’ll try some more.
I’ll also start reading academic papers as well, which I’ll share in another post.