Massive amounts of annotated data greatly contributed to the advance of the machine learning field. However such large data sets are often unavailable for novel tasks performed in realistic environments such as smart homes. In this domain, semantically annotated large voice command corpora for Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) are scarce, especially for non-English languages. We present the automatic generation process of a synthetic semantically-annotated corpus of French commands for smart-home to train pipeline and End-to-End (E2E) SLU models. SLU is typically performed through Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) in a pipeline. Since errors at the ASR stage reduce the NLU performance, an alternative approach is End-to-End (E2E) SLU to jointly perform ASR and NLU. To that end, the artificial corpus was fed to a text-to-speech (TTS) system to generate synthetic speech data. All models were evaluated on voice commands acquired in a real smart home. We show that artificial data can be combined with real data within the same training set or used as a stand-alone training corpus. The synthetic speech quality was assessedby comparing it to real data using dynamic time warping (DTW).

Ambient Assisted Living aims at enhancing the quality of life of older and disabled people at home thanks to Smart Homes. In particular, regarding elderly living alone at home, the detection of distress situation after a fall is very important to reassure this kind of population. However, many studies do not include tests in real settings, because data collection in this domain is very expensive and challenging and because of the few available data sets. The C IRDO corpus is a dataset recorded in realistic conditions in D OMUS , a fully equipped Smart Home with microphones and home automation sensors, in which participants performed scenarios including real falls on a carpet and calls for help. These scenarios were elaborated thanks to a field study involving elderly persons. Experiments related in a first part to distress detection in real-time using audio and speech analysis and in a second part to fall detection using video analysis are presented. Results show the difficulty of the task. The database can be used as standardized database by researchers to evaluate and compare their systems for elderly person’s assistance.

Vocal User Interfaces in domestic environments recently gained interest in the speech processing community. This interest is due to the opportunity of using it in the framework of Ambient Assisted Living both for home automation (vocal command) and for call for help in case of distress situations, i.e. after a fall. C IRDO X, which is a modular software, is able to analyse online the audio environment in a home, to extract the uttered sentences and then to process them thanks to an ASR module. Moreover, this system perfoms non-speech audio event classification; in this case, specific models must be trained. The software is designed to be modular and to process on-line the audio multichannel stream. Some exemples of studies in which C IRDO X was involved are described. They were operated in real environment, namely a Living lab environment.

Cet article présente un système capable de reconnaître les appels à l’aide de personnes âgées vivant à domicile afin de leur fournir une assistance. Le système utilise une technologie de Reconnaissance Automatique de la Parole (RAP) qui doit fonctionner en conditions de parole distante et avec de la parole expressive. Pour garantir l’intimité, le système s’exécute localement et ne reconnaît que des phrases prédéfinies. Le système a été évalué par 17 participants jouant des scénarios incluant des chutes dans un Living lab reproduisant un salon. Le taux d’erreur de détection obtenu, 29%, est encourageant et souligne les défis à surmonter pour cette tâche.

Ambient Assisted Living aims at enhancing the quality of life of older and disabled people at home thanks to Smart Homes and Home Automation. However, many studies do not include tests in real settings, because data collection in this domain is very expensive and challenging and because of the few available data sets. The S WEET-H OME multimodal corpus is a dataset recorded in realistic conditions in D OMUS, a fully equipped Smart Home with microphones and home automation sensors, in which participants performed Activities of Daily living (ADL). This corpus is made of a multimodal subset, a French home automation speech subset recorded in Distant Speech conditions, and two interaction subsets, the first one being recorded by 16 persons without disabilities and the second one by 6 seniors and 5 visually impaired people. This corpus was used in studies related to ADL recognition, context aware interaction and distant speech recognition applied to home automation controled through voice.