What is happening in research in 2024?
At Aristech, we have been contributing our expertise to various research projects for years. In the "SLiK - Synthese Linguistischer Korpusdaten" (synthesis of linguistic corpus data) funding project, we are working with project partners Kauz GmbH and the University of Rostock. The project provides tools for generating domain-specific synthetic speech data for small and medium-sized enterprises. We are contributing our expertise in speech recognition and text-to-speech to the project; Kauz GmbH is contributing their knowledge in the field of rule-based analysis and generation of written language data while the University of Rostock is contributing their expertise in low-resource deep learning. After two years of successful collaboration, we have now submitted the final report for "SLiK". The project has been completed 😊
Our VoluProf research project has recently been extended by six months. Together with our project partners (Deutsche Telekom AG, Volucap GmbH, German Research Center of Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), University of Rostock), we are developing an interactive mixed-reality format for online teaching. Students and pupils will be able to communicate with an avatar of a lecturer using STT and TTS via a chat system. In this project, we provide our expertise in TTS, voice generation, and voice cloning. The project team in the film city of Babelsberg is creating audio recordings of a real lecturer at the University of Rostock. The recordings will later be used for the VoluProf avatar. User studies have already been carried out with students from the University of Rostock using an early VoluProf demonstrator.
The demo app for the "Sprachversteher" project was launched in 2023. By the end of this year, the initial results of the studies are expected and we are hoping that they show a positive effect of the modifications. Another project meeting is scheduled for the summer and a study round with test subjects will also start. We are already very excited about the results of the study. In this project, we are working together with the ENT clinic at Heidelberg University Hospital on an innovative system to improve speech comprehension for people with age-related hearing loss.
All three projects are funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).
Our next project is already in the pipeline. The aim is to make AI automation accessible to tradespeople and SMEs. We are really looking forward to the launch. Stay tuned 😊