AlfaNum is an innovative company gathering a team of experts which, since 2003., has been striving to bring the world of modern speech technologies closer to a wide range of users.

Until today the company has developed software components for high quality speech recognition and synthesis in Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrin. In the development of these technologies, which were originally intended for the visually impaired, AlfaNum has established itself as the leader in the region. More information on these software components can be found on our products and services pages, and they can also be tested on our demo pages.

Besides speech technologies, AlfaNum also works on the development and implementation of products intended for the disabled, as well as the implementation of call centres, information centres and databases. If you are considering an upgrade to your system based on cutting-edge speech technologies or you need some other expert service in the field, feel free to contact us and we will justify your confidence.

As a result of the recent progress in computer technology, the personal computers of today are sufficiently efficient to recognize speech with high accuracy and synthesize speech of high quality. Furthermore, their relatively low price allows a wide range of users to feel the benefits of speech technologies. On the other hand, South Slavic languages are extremely complex and each one has its own particularities, which makes the development of speech technologies for any of these languages quite a difficult task. Furthermore, relatively small and closed markets related to each of these languages are an additional reason for which none of the leading companies in the world has attempted to develop speech synthesis or recognition for them until lately. Having recognized this potential strategic advantage in time, we have begun the development ourselves and achieving main objectives and activities.

  • The development of flexible text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) of high quality
  • The development of large vocabulary continuous automatic speech recognition (ASR)
  • The research and development of emotion speech recognition
  • The development of speech morphing systems
  • The development of natural language processing modules including dialogue management
  • The application of the developed speech technologies in Western Balkan countries:
    • in multimodal human-machine dialogue systems (IVR, smart phones, smart homes)
    • for purposes such as: text reading, text dictation, speech transcription
    • within aids for the physically disabled, visually impaired, speech impaired, hearing impaired.

Scientific research and development within the AlfaNum team are carried out by a group of experts working at the Department of Communications and Signal Processing at the Faculty of Technical Sciences in Novi Sad, Serbia. More details can be found at the AlfaNum project website.

 

 

The most important innovative results:

AlfaNum has already developed both small-to-medium vocabulary ASR and high-quality TTS in Serbian, Croatian and Montenegrin.

A number of valuable speech and language resources for Serbian and kindred South Slavic languages have been created within several projects over the last decade. Apart from these resources, a number of expert systems, machine learning systems as well as mathematical models have been developed and deployed in the first speech enabled products in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and North Macedonia - the countries where South Slavic languages are predominantly spoken. For example, one can listen to news at a number of speech-enabled web sites (Radio Television of Serbia - RTS, Radio Television of Vojvodina - RTV, eUprava, as well as several municipalities) using a computer or a smart phone. The visually impaired can listen to any text displayed on the screen using the software anReader based on AlfaNumTTS. The AlfaNumASR and AlfaNumTTS components have provided smart phones with basic speech generation and understanding functionalities in Serbian.

Further development of both large vocabulary ASR and more advanced TTS is based on the aforementioned speech and language resources. Both technologies will enable a much wider range of applications and will contribute to the preservation of Serbian and kindred languages in this new domain of communication – spoken dialogue between humans and machines.