‘Human Computer

Interfacing’
“BLISS to Blind” using “JAWS” SOFTWARE
(A HUMAN COMPUTER INTERFACING application)
speech synthesis which converts text to
speech, and the speech units. The third
part portrays the speech production by the

PREMBLE:
PREMBLE: vocal chords and acoustic phonetics. The

This paper was mainly intended for the next part is dealt with the detailed

blind people who could not make use of description on

computer efficienly, who could just

interact with computer only through the
braille display or the knowledge of
typing. In order to facilitate them to
constrict the vulnerabilities that peep out various converted speech units (words,

through, while engaging with system sylablles, demisylablles, diphone,

security and data security (giving wrong allophone, phoneme), the way in which

passwords) and other security threaten these primitive speech units are combined

applications our paper could serve as an to form a full speech with phonetic

alternative. sounds. The process indulged in the

ABSTRACT:
ABSTRACT: analysis of speech signals and the various

The Acronym for jaws is “Job Access synthesis methods, the coding of vocal

with Speech” .The first part of this paper tract parameters using Linear

introduces the necessity of refreshable Predictive Coding (LPC) synthesis with

Braille display, device which rests on the its block diagram. The fifth part is all

keyboard by means of raising dots about Automatic Speech Recognition

through holes in flat. .The second part (ASR) principles and the stages involved

focuses on the fundamentals of the in it, speech unit’s synthesis influencing

factors .The later part discusses the signal
processing front end and
parameterisation and their feature,
blocking and windowing.
The sixth part discusses the various
speech recognition techniques,
and finally the conclusion part followed
by bibliography.
INDEX
• Introduction
• Why JAWS
• Fundamentals of speech synthesis
• Speech units
• Speech production and Acoustic
units Synthesis methods
INTRODUCTION:
The refreshable Braille display is an
electro-mechanical device for displaying
Braille characters, usually by means of
raising dots through holes in a flat
surface. The display sits under the
computer keyboard.
It is used to present text to computer
users who are blind and cannot use a
normal computer monitor. Speech
synthesizers are also commonly used for
the same task, and a blind user may
switch between the two systems
depending on circumstances. Because of
the complexity of producing a reliable
display that will cope with daily wear and
tear, these displays are expensive.
Usually, only 40 or 80 Braille cells are
displayed. Models with 18-40 cells exist
in some note taker devices. On some
models the position of the cursor is
represented by vibrating the dots, and
some models have a switch associated
with each cell to move the cursor to that
cell directly. The mechanism which raises
the dots uses the piezo effect. Some
crystals expand, when a voltage is applied
to them. Such a crystal is connected to a
lever, which in turn raises the dot. There
has to be such a Crystal for each dot of
the display, i.e., eight crystals per
character.
The software that controls the display is
called a screen reader. It gathers the
content of the screen from the operating
system converts it into Braille characters
and sends it to the display. Screen readers
for graphical operation systems are
especially complex, because graphical
elements like windows and slide bars
have to be interpreted and described in
text form. A new development, called the
rotating wheel Braille display, was
developed in 2000 by the National
Institute of Standards and Technology
And is still in the process of
commercialization. Braille dots are put on
the edge of a spinning wheel, which
allows the blind user to read continuously
with a stationary finger while the wheel
spins at a selected speed. The Braille dots
are set in a simple scanning style fashion
as the dots on the wheel spins past a
stationary actuator that sets the Braille
characters. As a result, manufacturing
complexity is greatly reduced and
rotating wheel Braille display will be
much more inexpensive than traditional
Braille displays.
Fig : A Blind Person Communicating
With The Computer
FUNDAMENTALS OF SPEECH
SYNTHESIS:
Speech synthesis is the automatic
generation of speech waveforms based on
an input text to synthesize and on
previously analyzed digital speech data.
The critical issues for current speech
synthesizers concerns trade-offs among
the conflicting demands of maximizing
the quality of speech, while minimizing
memory space, algorithmic complexity,
and computation speed. The text might be
entered by keyboard or optical character
recognition or obtained from a stored
database. Speech synthesizers then
convert the text into a sequence of speech
units by lexical access routines. Using
large speech units such as phrases and
sentences can give high quality output
speech but requires much more memory.
A block diagram of the steps in speech
synthesis is shown below.
Fig: block diagram of text to
speech synthesis
Speech units are retrieved and
concatenated to output the synthetic
speech. Speech is often modeled as the
response of a time varying linear filter
(corresponding to the vocal tract from the
glottis to the lips) to an excitation
 waveform consisting of broadband noise,
a periodic waveform of pulses, or a
combination. In summary, the most
important components of a synthesizer’s
algorithm are
1. Stored speech units: storage of
speech parameters, obtained from
natural speech in terms of speech
units.
2. Concatenation routines:
program rules to concatenate
these units, smoothing
parameters to create
trajectories. Real time speech
synthesizer has been available for
many years. Such speech is
generally intelligible, but lack of
natural ness. Quality inferior to
that of human speech is usually
due to inadequate modeling of
three aspects of human speech
Units Quantity Descriptions
Words 300,000 The fundamental units of a
(50,000) sentence.
Syllables 20,000 It consists of a nucleus
(4400)
Demisyllable 4500 It is obtained by dividing syllables Advantages:
(2000) in half, with the cut during the
vowel, where the effects of co
articulation are minimal.
production: coarticulation,
intonation and vocal-tract
excitation. Most synthesizers
reproduce speech bandwidth in
the range of 0-3 KHZ (e.g. for
telephone applications)
Or 0-5 KHZ (eg. For high quality).
Frequencies up to 3 kHz are sufficient for
vowel perception since vowels are
A adequately specified by the first three
formants.
the SPEECH UNITS:
time The choices of speech units determine
the storage memory required and the
quality of the synthetic speech. Some
possible units are described in the table
given below. The number in the bracket
under the column “quantity” is the
sufficient numbers of sub word units
describe all English words.
Advantages/Disadvantages
Advantages:
Yield high quality speech
Simple concatenation synthesis algorithm
Disadvantages:
Limited by the memory requirement
Need to adjust the duration of word
Disadvantage:
Syllable boundary is uncertain
Preserve the transition between adjacent phones
Simple smoothing rules
Produce smooth speech
Diphone 1500 It is obtained by dividing a speech Advantages:
(1200) waveform into phone-sized units, Preserve the transition between adjacent phones
with the cuts in the middle of each Simple smoothing rules produce smooth speech
phone.
Allophone 250 They are phonemic variants. Advantage:
Reduce the complexity of the interpolation
algorithm comparing to phonemes
Phonemes 37 It is the fundamental unit of Advantages:
phonology. Memory requirement is small
Disadvantages:
Require complex smoothing rules to represent the
co articulation effect need to adjust intonation at
each Context

Consider the English word "segmentation". Its representation according to each of the above
sub word unit sets is:

SPEECH PRODUCTION AND analyze the speech sounds. Acoustic

ACOUSTIC-PHONETICS: phonetics is the study of the physics of the
speech signal. When sound travels through
The English phonemes can be classified
the air from the speaker’s mouth to the
according to how they are produced by
hearer’s ear it does so in the form of
vocal organ. An understanding of speech
vibrations in the air. It is possible to
production mechanism will help us to
measure and analyze these vibrations by
mathematical techniques studied
physics of sound.
SPEECH UNITS:
Listener into a sequence of words and
sentences converts the acoustic signals.
The most familiar language units are
words. They can be thought of as a
sequence of smaller linguistic units,
phoneme, which are the fundamental units
of phonology. We will use ARPABET
symbols in the rest of this paper. The
easiest way to understand the nature of
phonemes is to consider a group of words
like “hid”, “ head “, “hood”, and “hod”.
All these words are made up of an initial,
middle, and a final element. In our
Fricative sounds are generated by
constricting the vocal tract at some point
along the vocal tract and forcing the air
stream to flow through at a high enough
examples, the initial and final elements are
in identical, but the middle elements are
different. It is the different in this middle
element that distinguish the four words.
Similarly, we can find those sounds, which
differentiate one word from another for all
the words of a language. Such
distinguishing sounds are called
phonemes. There are about fifty phoneme
units in English. The following figure
shows a segment of vowel /ix/. The quasi-
periodicity (almost periodic) of voiced
speech can be observed.
Velocity to produce turbulence. This
turbulent air sounds like a hiss e.g. /hh/
or /s/.
Plosive or stop sounds are resulted from
blocking the vocal tract by closing the lips
and nasal cavity, allowing the air pressure
to build up behind the closure, and
following by a sudden release of it. This
ACOUSTIC PHONETICS
ANALYSIS OF SPEECH
SIGNALS:
Based on the knowledge of the speech
production mechanism and the study of
acoustic phonetics,we are able to extract a
set of features,which can best represent a
particular phoneme. One of the popular
techniques is the spectrogram,which
describe how the frequency contents of a
speech signal change with time. Suppose
mechanism produces sounds like /p/ and
/g/. The following figure shows the stop
/g/. The silence before the burst is the stop
closure.
we have a signal,which is sampled at
16Khz, the typical steps to compute the
spectrogram are described as follows. The
speech is blocked by Hamming window
with duration of 256 samples. A 56-point
FFT( fast Fourier transform) is applied to
each windowed speech. The power spectra
in dB are plotted. Horizontal bars in the
spectrogram display the format
frequencies while the vertical lines there
indicate the pitch period( i.e. the inverse of
the fundamental frequency).
Synthesis Methods: 1. Waveform Synthesizers

Synthesis can be classified by how they 2. Terminal Analog Synthesizers

parameterize the speech for storage and
3. Articulaticulatory Synthesizers
synthesis.

4. Formant Synthesizers
Formant Synthesisers: Formant synthesizer employs formant
resonances and bandwidths to represent
the stored spectrum. The vocal tract filter is
usually represented by 10-23 spectral
parameters. Formant synthesizers have an
advantage over LPC systems in that
bandwidths can be more easily manipulated
and that zeros can be directly introduced
into the filter. However, locating the popes
and zeros automatically in natural speech is
a more difficult task than automatic LPC
analysis. Most of formant synthesizers use
a model similar to that shown below.

Fig: Block Diagram Finally, an effective, interactive

Of Format Synthesizer communicative medium has
been deviced with the glimpse of
CONCLUSION:
Human Computer Interface using
 the Braille displays. Speaker
independent speech
synthesizers could presume
highly sophisticated algorithms,
which consume much time and
space complexities.

Thus the JAWS persuade the blind

people to make use of computer as usual
as a normal man.

BIBLOGRAPHY:

The following websites have been

taken for reference:
1. www.wikipedia.org
2. www.asel.udel.edu