What is speech Processing in artificial intelligence?

Speech processing is the computer understanding of the voice. It is the process of turning a speech signal into useful information for users. Speech processing is to turn continuous analog speech signal into discrete digital signal. It is about converting sound waves into information for machine reading. Speech processing is basically a sub-field of computer science that provides methods to convert speech signals into text or other useful data. The most common application of speech processing is to convert speech signals into textual data. In this case, speech processing deals mainly with modeling the speech signal and implementing a suitable speech recognition engine.

Which algorithm is used for speech recognition?

The algorithms for speech recognition are very advanced. These algorithms convert voice signals into text characters. The main speech recognition algorithm is Hidden Markov Model. This algorithm has been implemented in many operating systems like Mac OS, iPhone, Android and others. The speech recognition software works on this particular algorithm by switching between different states. This algorithm will be replaced by the deep learning AI(Artificial Intelligence) in the near future since this algorithm doesn’t require any feature engineering.

What are the applications of speech recognition?

Speech recognition is the process of converting spoken words into text. In areas such as call centers, this can be a very useful technology. A call center professional can deal with multiple calls at once by using speech recognition to dictate the information that goes on the call. Also, in an office setting, speech recognition can be used to type up documents. In addition, this technology can be used in other areas such as gaming. A lot of games now allow users to navigate menus by using their voice.

Top 6 Speech Processing Projects & Topics For Beginners & Experienced [2023]

We’ve all heard of text classification, image classification, but have you tried audio classification? Leave classification; there are a ton of other things we can do in audio by using artificial intelligence and deep learning. In this article, we’ll be talking about various speech processing projects. The following article will also talk about some of the top machine learning projects for beginners.

Top Machine Learning and AI Courses Online

Master of Science in Machine Learning & AI from LJMU		Executive Post Graduate Programme in Machine Learning & AI from IIITB
Advanced Certificate Programme in Machine Learning & NLP from IIITB	Advanced Certificate Programme in Machine Learning & Deep Learning from IIITB	Executive Post Graduate Program in Data Science & Machine Learning from University of Maryland
To Explore all our certification courses on AI & ML, kindly visit our page below.
Machine Learning Certification

You can work on these projects to get more familiar with different applications of AI in the audio and sound analysis. From audio classification to recommendation systems for music, there are many project ideas in this list. So, let’s dive in.

Enrol for the Machine Learning Course from the World’s top Universities. Earn Masters, Executive PGP, or Advanced Certificate Programs to fast-track your career.

Speech Processing Projects & Topics

1. Classify Audio

Audio classification is among the most in-demand speech processing projects. As deep learning focuses on building a network that resembles a human mind, sound recognition is also essential. While image classification has become much advanced and widespread, audio classification is still a relatively new concept.

Trending Machine Learning Skills

AI Courses	Tableau Certification
Natural Language Processing	Deep Learning AI

So, you can work on an audio classification project and get ahead of your peers with ease. You might wonder how you’d start working on an audio classification project, but don’t worry because Google has got your back through AudioSet. AudioSet is a vast collection of labeled audio that they collected from YouTube videos. They all are 10-seconds long and are incredibly varied.

You can use the audio files present in AudioSet to train and test your model. They are correctly labeled, so working with them is relatively more straightforward. There are currently 632 audio event classes and more than two million sound clips present in AudioSet. Check Google AudioSet here.

As a beginner, focus on extracting specific features from an audio file and analyzing it through a neural network. You can use small audio clips to train the neural network.

Additional Tips

Use Data Augmentation to avoid overfitting, which would bother you a lot while performing audio classification. Additionally, we recommend using a convolutional neural network, also known as CNN, to perform audio classification. You might also use slowing down or speeding up of sound to suit the needs of your model.

2. Generate Audio Fingerprints

One of the most recent and impressive technologies is audio fingerprinting, that’s why we’ve added it in our list of speech processing projects. When you generate an audio signal by extracting the relevant acoustic features from a piece of audio, then condense the specific audio signal, we call this process audio fingerprinting. You can say that an audio fingerprint is a summary of a particular audio signal. They have the name ‘fingerprint’ in them because every audio fingerprint is unique, just like human fingerprints.

By generating audio fingerprints, you can identify the source of a particular sound at any instance. Shazam is probably the most famous example of an audio fingerprinting application. Shazam is an app that lets people identify songs by listening through a small section of the same.

Additional Tips

A common problem in generating audio fingerprints is background noise. While some people use software solutions to eliminate background noise, you can try representing audio in a different format and remove the unnecessary clutter from your file. After that, you can implement the required algorithms to distinguish the fingerprints.

3. Separate Audio Sources

Another prevalent topic among speech processing projects is the separation of audio sources. In simple terms, audio source separation focuses on distinguishing different types of audio source signals present in the midst of signals. You perform audio source separation every day. A rough example of audio source separation in real-life is when you distinguish the lyrics of a song. In that instance, you’re separating the lyrics’ audio signals from the rest of the music. You can use deep learning to perform this as well!

To work on this project, you can use the LibriSpeech and the UrbanNoise8k datasets. The former is a collection of audio clips of people reading books without any background noise, whereas the latter is a collection of background noises. Using both of them, you can easily create a model that can distinguish specific audio signals from one another. You can convert spectrograms to make your job easier.

FYI: Free nlp online course!

Additional Tips

Remember to use the loss function as it focuses on what part you have to minimize. Using the loss function, you can teach your model to ignore background noises with much more ease. Here’s an excellent audio source separation app as an example.

4. Segment Audio

Segmenting refers to dividing something into different parts according to their features. So, audio segmentation is when you segment audio signals according to their unique characteristics. It’s a crucial part of speech processing projects, and you’d need to perform audio segmentation on nearly all of the projects we’ve listed here. It’s similar to data cleaning but in the audio format.

An excellent application of audio segmentation is heart monitoring, where you can analyze the sound of heartbeats and separate its two segments for enhanced analysis. Another general application of audio segmentation is in speech recognition, where the system can separate the words from background noise and enhance the performance of the speech recognition software.

Additional Tips

Here’s an excellent audio segmentation project published in the MECS press. It discusses the fundamentals of automatic audio segmentation and proposes multiple segmentation architectures for different applications. Going through it would certainly be useful in understanding audio segmentation better.

5. Automated Music Tags

This project is similar to the audio classification project we discussed earlier. However, there’s a slight difference. Music tagging helps in creating metadata for songs so people can find them easily in an extensive database. In music tagging, you have to work with multiple classes. So you have to implement a multi-label classification algorithm. However, as we’ve discussed in previous projects, we start with the basics, aka, the audio features.

Then we’ll use a classifier that separates the audio files according to the similarities in their features. Unlike the audio classification we discussed in the project above, we’ll have to use a multi-label classification algorithm here.

As a form of practice, you should start with the Million Song Dataset, a free collection of popular tracks. The dataset doesn’t have audio, and it only has features, so an extensive section is pre-done. You can train and test your model by using the Million Song dataset easily. Check out the Million Song dataset here.

Additional Tips

You can use CNNs to work on this project. Check out this case study, which discusses audio tagging in detail and uses Keras and CNNs for this task.

6. Recommender System for Music

Recommender systems are widely popular these days. From eCommerce to media, nearly every B2C industry is implementing them to reap their benefits. A recommender system suggests products or services to a user according to their past purchases or behavior. Netflix’s recommendation system is probably the most famous among AI professionals and enthusiasts alike. However, unlike Netflix’s recommendation system, your recommendation system would be analyzing audio to predict user behavior. Music streaming platforms such as Spotify are already implementing such recommender systems to enhance user experience.

It’s an advanced-level project which we can divide into the following sections:

You’ll first have to create an audio classification system that can distinguish a song’s specific features from the other one. This system will analyze the songs our user listens to the most.
You’ll then have to build a recommendation system that analyzes those features and finds the common attributes among them.
After that, the audio classification system would find the features present in other songs our user hasn’t listened to yet.
Once you have those features available, your recommendation system would compare them with its findings and recommend more songs according to them.

While this project may sound a bit complicated, once you’ve built both models, things will get easier.

Learn more: 13 Interesting Neural Network Project Ideas & Topics for Beginners

Additional Tips

A recommender system focuses on classification algorithms. If you haven’t created one in the past, you should first practice building one before moving onto this project.

You can also start with a small dataset of songs by classifying them according to the genre or artist. For example, if a user listens to The Weeknd, it’s highly probable they’d listen to other songs present in his genres, such as R&B and Pop. This will help you shorten the database for your recommendation system.

Popular AI and ML Blogs & Free Courses

IoT: History, Present & Future	Machine Learning Tutorial: Learn ML	What is Algorithm? Simple & Easy
Robotics Engineer Salary in India : All Roles	A Day in the Life of a Machine Learning Engineer: What do they do?	What is IoT (Internet of Things)
Permutation vs Combination: Difference between Permutation and Combination	Top 7 Trends in Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning	Machine Learning with R: Everything You Need to Know
AI & ML Free Courses
Introduction to NLP	Fundamentals of Deep Learning of Neural Networks	Linear Regression: Step by Step Guide
Artificial Intelligence in the Real World	Introduction to Tableau	Case Study using Python, SQL and Tableau

Growing Importance Of Machine Learning

From retail, and healthcare, to financial services, and manufacturing, Machine Learning is widely used across various sectors worldwide, because of the several benefits it bears. Heavy industries are actually dependent on machine learning to improve customer experience, reduce cost, and accelerate innovation. The demand for machine learning has therefore seemed to increase manifold over the past few years. In today’s technology-driven world, data is one of the most important aspects of any business. Data-driven decisions can either make or break a business, therefore, it is paramount that you know how to properly access and utilize this data. This is where machine learning comes into play. It has the potential to unlock the huge underlying potential of corporate and customer data. Based on this retrieved data, businesses can now make all their decisions accordingly and stay one step ahead of the competition.

With that said, let’s look at some of the best machine learning projects listed below.

Best Machine Learning Projects

Mentioned below are some of the top machine learning projects for beginners.

Human Activities Recognition With Mobile Phones

In today’s technology-driven world, most smartphones come with inbuilt features that automatically detect when we engage in any specific activity. This might include running or cycling, among others. This can, infact, turn out to be quite an interesting machine-learning project, especially for beginners. They can try to build classification models that can predict future activities in a much more accurate way. Furthermore, this also carries the potential to understand the various ways to solve multi-classification problems.

Wine Quality Prediction

Here is yet another interesting machine-learning project for beginners. Wine shopping can seem quite tedious since it is either a hit or a miss. There is no middle ground in between. Unless you are an expert, who knows all the nuances of how wine is being made, and the different factors surrounding it, such as age and price, there is no guaranteed way of predicting whether the wine is of high quality. Wine quality data sets can actually be quite an interesting way to address this problem. Furthermore, as a beginner, you also get to explore several real-time applications of machine learning with this project, such as data visualization, R programming, and data exploration, among others.

Sales Prediction Project

The main aim of this project is to predict the number of sales shops make every month. It does so with the help of the provided daily sales data set. The data set is equipped with a training set and test set, which will aid in forecasting the total number of sales. Yet another interesting feature of this project is it is dynamic since the list of shops or products can differ from month to month.

Loan Prediction Project

Last but not least, yet another interesting topic to make it to the list of top machine learning projects is this one. Getting a loan from banks can be quite a tedious task for some. This project aims to address this problem and come up with an effective solution that will help to predict the amount of loan a user can obtain from a bank. This is done with the help of a model that classifies various user information such as education, employment, income, and prospects, among others. The loan prediction data set stores all this information, which can further be utilized in the process of making a Machine Learning model.

Learn More About Deep Learning

Audio analysis and speech recognition are relatively new technologies than their textual and visual counterparts. However, as you can see in this list, various implementations and possibilities are present in this field. Thanks to artificial intelligence and deep learning, we can expect more advanced audio analysis in the future.

These speech processing projects are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other applications of data learning available. If you want to explore more deep learning projects, we recommend these resources:

Also, you can take a machine learning and deep learning course to become a proficient expert. The course will provide you with training from industry leaders through projects, videos, and study materials.