1. rospeex
A Cloud-based speech communication toolkit for ROS
2013/12/13
Komei Sugiura
National Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Japan
komei.sugiura@nict.go.jp

2. ROS (Robot Operating System)
• ROS: middleware for robots
– Version 1.0 released in 2010
– Global de facto standard
– From driver and package management to learning and
visualization
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3. Speech communication toolkit for ROS
rospeex
• ROS compatible
• Speech recognition using VoiceTra engine
• Other functionalities
– Noise reduction, non-monologues speech synthesis
Conventional packages
rospeex
Speech recognition/ Sphinx, festival, Julius
VoiceTra engine
synthesis
(or commercial tools)
(or third-party engines)
Engine
Stand alone
Cloud-based
Language
Single language
ja, en, zh, ko
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4. Position in Cloud Robotics
• Cloud robotics [James Kuffner@Google, 2011]
– Manipulation using Google Goggles [Kehoe+ 2013]
– Knowledge sharing based on RoboEarth [Tenorth+ 2012]
– Speech communication for robots
rospeex
Cloud-based
Incompatible
Commercial systems
(Nuance, ToSpeak,
AmiVoice Cloud, ..)
rospeex
Many
OpenHRI, HARK,
PocketSphinx, Festival
Stand-alone
Robot middleware
compatible

5. Quadrilingual communication using rospeex
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6. rospeex provides speech recognition/synthesis,
user constructs dialogue processing
Input from other modules
(Sensors, recognized obj, etc)
Speech
input
Noise
reduction
VAD
Task manager
Output to other modules
(Actuators, learning, etc)
Speech module
Speech
recognition
Dialogue
processing
Speech
synthesis
Speech
output
Speech recognition
& synthesis servers
Provided by
rospeex
Provided by
the user
Provided by
third parties
Speech recognition
& synthesis servers

7. Non-monologue speech synthesis for robots
• Reading-style robot voice
– Monotonous, unnatural and unfriendly
– Hard to realize that the robot is asking
a question
XIMERA 3
(Text reading)
Voice talent
• Conventional text-to-speech (TTS) systems
are not optimized for communication
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8. Demo
http://komeisugiura.jp/software/nm_tts.html
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9. Using speech recognition/synthesis without ROS
• Send JSON file to the server
– Recognition http://rospeex.ucri.jgn-x.jp/nauth_json/jsServices/VoiceTraSS
– Synthesis
http://rospeex.ucri.jgn-x.jp/nauth_json/jsServices/VoiceTraSR
• Sample codes (JavaScript, Python, C++) are available
Non-monologue speech synthesis
{ "method":"recognize",
"params":[
"ja",
{“audio”:“base64-encoded wav",
"audioType":"audio/x-wav",
"voiceType":"*"
}]}
Recognition
Search
{ “method” : “speak”,
"params" : [
"ja",
"こんにちは",
"*",
"audio/x-wav"
]}
Synthesis