1 Semi-Automatic Aligning of Swedish Forensic Phonetic Phone Speech in Praat using Viterbi Recognition and HMM

Automatically aligning sound and text on phone, syllable, word and phrase level is a valuable tool. Handling speech databases of various kinds and developing speech technology tools most often demands some kind of aligning. Using the free software Praat a plugin framework for automatic aligning, Easyalign, has been developed. With a Swedish grapheme to phone converter, a Swedish trained hidden markov model and the viterbi function HVite from the toolkit HTK, automatic aligning of an authentic forensic phonetic recording and corresponding orthographic transcription was produced. The result, to some extent successful, and conclusion invites to more research and developments for the future. To automatically align text and sound is enormously valuable when one is handling large speech databases, either for research or for developing speech technology tools such as automatic speech recognition or text to speech systems. It is also a very useful tool in forensic speaker identification as one often receives a tapped recordin