Applications of Speech Technologies in Western Balkan Countries

Abstract

The chapter will present the first applications of speech technologies in the countries of Western Balkans, launched by the Serbian company AlfaNum. The speech technologies for Serbian and kindred South Slavic languages are developed in cooperation with the University of Novi Sad, Serbia. Most of these applications are rather innovative in Western Balkans and they will serve as a base for complex systems which will enable 20 millions of inhabitants of this part of Europe to talk to machines in their midst in their native languages, equally to their counterparts who live in more developed countries in the region. Firstly, the importance of research and development of speech technologies will be stressed, particularly in view of their language dependence and, on the other hand, the possibility of their wide application. The central part of the chapter will focus on the results of the research and development of the first applications of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) across Western Balkans – some of them are a novelty in a much wider region as well. The paper will be concluded by the directions of future research and development of new applications of speech technologies in the Western Balkan region and worldwide.