My name is Henk van den Heuvel and I am a speech technologist at the Radboud University of Nijmegen.
I have an incredible passion for sound and for making it available.
And it's right in the 20th century that sound could actually be recorded and analyzed
I started my career as a phonetician but developed into a speech engineer
and that's a development which I consider as extremely important.
For the Digital Humanities, the field in which we are active,
it means that speech technology has a lot to offer with
regard to opening up audio and video and making it available.
As speech technologists we can make an important contribution by digitizing analogue material
such as tape recordings, turning them into digital data.
But as speech technologist the next step is to make the data accessible,
because if you digitize it and put it back on the shelve,
people have the possibility to request it, but they don’t know what the content is about.
By applying speech technology methods you can really make a difference.
I will give you some examples of what speech technology has to offer.
Think of automatic speech recognition (ASR), which makes it possible
to convert the spoken audio into text,
so that it can be read.
You can transcribe the text manually, but this is incredibly more time consuming then using ASR.
What hardly no one knows, is that speech technology is also able to recognize speakers.
It is able to identify who is speaking at what time.
This information can be added to the recording enriching it, making it readable and more accessible.
What the speech technologist is able to do, is on the one hand
make the material available in digital form
and on the other hand, and this is what I find most interesting, opening up the data,
And for me as speech technologist the material that belongs to the field of Digital Humanities
is about people who want to voice their experiences, who they are, and what they have experienced,
and what they consider important, what they want to sing what they want to tell the world.
Speech technology offers opportunities to further delve into this material.
It is not about casual talk, that you use when talking on your mobile phone.
It is about material that poses a challenge
Because on the background all kinds of sounds can be heard
cars are driving by, doors are slammed, several people are speaking at the same time
Speakers are often elderly people, for instance when interviewing veterans,
and this offers a particular challenge for speech technology.
We are able to surpass these obstacles and to offer these people a way of opening up their stories
in a fast and efficient way and to make sure that their voices are actually heard.