Speech processing is the study of speech signals and the processing methods of these signals.
The signals are usually processed in a digital representation whereby speech processing can be seen as the intersection of digital signal processing and natural language processing.
Speech processing can be divided in the following categories:
- Speech recognition, which deals with analysis of the linguistic content of a speech signal.
- Speaker recognition, where the aim is to recognise the identity of the speaker.
- Enhancement of speech signals, e.g. Noise reduction,
- Speech coding for compression and transmission of speech. See also Telecommunication.
- Voice analysis for medical purposes, such as analysis of vocal loading and dysfunction of the vocal cords.
- Artificial voice : the artificial synthesis of speech, which usually means computer generated speech and the speech recognition by computers.
See also: Audio signal processing, Linguistics, Phonetics, Utterance, Speech signal processing