This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project from Signal Separation Technologies (SST) applies noise cancellation to enable speech recognition systems to function more effectively in noisy environments such as automobiles where, in addition, hands-free operation of the speech microphone is a desired capability, e.g., in voice commands to car phones, conversing on car phones, and non-emergency commands to operate windows. Building on the Signal-Free Reference using Singular-Value Decomposition (SFR-SVD)-based noise canceller produced under an SBIR contract from Army, the novel and highly effective noise canceling algorithms are now believed to be capable of solving the noisy environment problem. The proposed application will be evaluated by measuring the improvement in percentage of correctly interpreted commands when noise canceling is applied. Speech recognition systems are receiving considerable attention as reflected in Business Week's 1998 Special Report with the subheading "Speech Technology is the Next Big Thing in Computing" which discussed progress at the major manufacturers of speech recognition and software systems. Such systems significantly lose reliability in the presence of engine, road, and other noise. In this context, Signal Separation Technologies proffers its technology: a high accuracy signal separation noise canceller which has the potential to work effectively over a wide frequency range for use as an input to speech recognition systems. The initial target market for this technology is luxury cars, but penetration into the total car market of over 100 million is anticipated in to follow. In the United States alone, there are 10 million luxury cars and it is estimated that a good 50% are likely to have speech recognizers in the near future.
