Short Description

At the SPSC, we are currently building up an automatic speech recognition system for Austrian German and we will further adapt it to conversational speech. For this purpose, we recorded read and conversational speech from 40 Austrian speakers. The aim of the proposed master thesis is to integrate these new materials and tools for Austrian German into the dialogue system of the social robot Furhat. Since there does not exist a running dialogue system for Austrian German yet, big part of the work is to make a review of available training data and to test tools for implementing such a system. The final goal is to have a first prototype of Furhat communicating in Austrian German.

Your Tasks

• Review of literature
• Programming of interactions with Furhat
• Finetune an ASR for real-time speech recognition of Austrian German
• Record human-robot interactions, analysis and validation
• Documentation

Your Requirements

• Motivation and interest in speech communication
• Excellent programming skills (e.g., Python)