Abstract
The paper covers challenges and experiences related to
constructing and apllying a telephone speech database bandwidth
in telecommunications domain in Poland. Speech processing
technologies like text to speech, speech and speaker recognition
or speech coding are used in many telecommunications services,
especially in wireless telephony, intelligent network and computer
telephony. Performance evaluation of telecommunications speech
processing systems very often need a specific kind of speech
database, not only lexically balanced but also containing
telephone speech signals of different quality. The sources of
noise and speech signal distortion in telephone chain are
described. The connection from the user telephone to the network
varies widely: analog connections of varying quality, ISDN, analog
cellular, and three types of digital cellular are all possible.
Network transmission can be analog of varying quality or digital,
which greatly enhances speech quality but introduces some
pitfalls.
There are some differences between telecommunications networks in Western
and Central and Eastern Europe. The average subscriber loop in Central and
Eastern Europe is longer than in Western Europe. Due to this fact,
the attenuation of speech signal is stronger. Also, transmission networks
are mainly analog. A method of constructing a telephone speech database
tailored to specific parameters of Polish telecommunications networks is
presented.
Intelligibility evaluation results of encoded speech in cellular telephony based on a phonetically balanced database of Polish lagatoms are given. The database has been developed for this purpose at the Institute of Telecommunications, WUT. Speech transmission for the experiments was achieved by creating different kinds of telephone connections, analog and digital.