Speech Technologies

The Company: Dutchear with Prime Vision

Prime Vision has a strategic partnership with sister-company Dutchear to deliver recognition-based solutions whether the task is visual or audible.  Eddy Thans, CEO Prime Vision, comments "This is a powerful combination of two research-led organisations at the leading edge of technological development in the field of recognition".

Dutchear is wholly-owned by TNO (Prime Vision 40% shareholder) and delivers solutions to clients in central government, local municipalities, broadcasters, police, courts and hospitals and many more organisations within the Netherlands.  The new partnership will see a new brand "Prime

Ear" launched to represent the expansion of audible recognition solutions internationally.

The Technology & Solutions

Speech-recognition technology enables processes and interfaces to become more efficient, safer and more user-friendly. Our solutions make use of a number of speech-recognition technologies:

Automated Speech Recognition (ASR): means that a computer can understand what is being said. The speech-recognition system converts spoken words into text. Speech-recognition systems can also search for specific fragments in audio and video files.

Text-To-Speech (TTS): does the exact opposite. TTS converts text into speech. This technology can be used to automatically read information aloud to someone.

In addition to ASR and TTS, Dutchear also uses speaker-identification and speaker-verification technology. Speaker identification detects who is speaking, while speaker verification determines whether you are who you say you are. An ideal technology for securing information (biometric access security).

In Prime Vision's traditional postal market, these new capabilities may augment the current automated identification technologies offered, for example enabling the spoken input of people loading material handling systems or processing rejects.

There are many more applications currently under development, for example:

Automated closed-captioning on TV broadcasts;
Automated indexing and key-word spotting in any audio or video source, i.e. meetings, interviews (a search engine for audio).

Check-out www.dutchear.com for more details.     
Note: Currently Dutch language site only.  English site coming soon.