Prof Aditi Lahiri is delighted to be awarded her third ERC "Proof of Concept" award. Building on the existing PAAL and FlexSR projects, the FLEX-CODESWITCH project is a new project that will incorporate code-switching into our existing speech recognition technology.
Many people speak more than one language and often swap between them during conversations instinctively. Increasingly industries like banking are using AI for speech recognition which struggles to cope with this widespread phenomenon.
Current AI speech recognition systems use massive amounts of data, and cannot deal with regional variations, such as different accents and words, let alone switching between languages. People however are great at this and FlexSR is modelled on how people actually recognise language in a way that current AI systems cannot.
The benefits of this technology to society are that it is easier and cheaper for industrial and other sectors to use it compared to current AI. This is because FlexSR requires less data, less storage and less computational power to run making it very flexible! FlexSR doesn’t need retraining to handle different languages and can be used from a hand-held device like a mobile phone for internet banking. It will become a very useful tool for a wide variety of users.
