Kawasaki, Japan :  Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. today announced that it has developed technology that, based on a speaker’s voice, detects in real time and with high accuracy the applicable area in presentation or remote-conference materials.

For meeting materials, product pamphlets, and other presentation materials, providing supplementary information and displaying a section as it is being discussed by the presenter is effective in promoting understanding of the speaker’s explanation. To realize this, it is necessary to identify at a glance the place being explained within the materials. However, raising the precision of detecting the correct place after just a few words has proved problematic.

Fujitsu has developed technology that compares spoken words against the content of the presentation materials, and uses characteristics of the presentation’s sequence based on statistical calculations to filter candidate sections of the presentation materials, in order to accurately identify the correct section in real time, based on only a few spoken words. When tested in a prototype system designed to automatically highlight the correct place in presentation materials, this technology was found to detect the correct section with 97% accuracy.

It is expected that this technology can be used to create a communication-support system that uses ICT to recognize the content of speech and provide appropriate information in a broad range of settings where information is explained, such as teleconferences, electronic educational materials, and consultations with customers in stores.

Background

Business communications are often based on materials, such as pamphlets used for product explanations, meetings that follow an agenda or talks that use slides that are shared with participants. Given this, there is a need to communicate so that listeners understand quickly, clearly, and easily.

To improve the efficiency of such work-related communications, Fujitsu has developed a communication-support system for communication involving text materials that uses speech-recognition technology to recognize what is being said in real time in order to provide the appropriate information (Figure 1).

Technological Issues

Commonly, the frequency with which spoken words appear in presentation materials is used to identify the place within the presentation that is being discussed. This method employs techniques such as detecting words from recorded speech and is effective when they can be sufficiently extracted. However it is not suited for real-time identification of the correct section when the presenter has only spoken a few words, as there is no way to distinguish word frequency. Also, with current speech-recognition technologies, a misrecognition rate of up to 10% is unavoidable. As a result, with inferences based on just a few words, errors in recognition have a significant impact on accuracy.