speechrich

Speechrich is a hypothetical software framework and data standard intended to support rich speech processing applications. It defines a unified data representation for audio, transcripts, speaker metadata, and linguistic annotations, coupled with application programming interfaces for both real-time streaming and offline processing. The goal of Speechrich is to improve interoperability among automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech, and spoken language understanding systems while simplifying data sharing for research and development. It emphasizes modularity, privacy, and accessibility as core design principles.

At its core, Speechrich consists of a flexible data schema, a set of reference implementations in multiple programming languages, and pluggable processing modules. The data schema supports cross-language alignment, speaker and channel metadata, and time-stamped annotations. Processing modules cover acoustic modeling, language modeling, voice generation, and post-processing like noise reduction and emotion analysis. The framework encourages on-device processing options to protect user privacy and reduce latency.

Key features include support for multiple languages and dialects, high-fidelity audio codecs, and robust handling of noisy or reverberant environments. It provides tools for prosody and emotion analysis, speaker adaptation, and accessibility features such as real-time captions and sign-language integration. It also offers benchmarking tools and dataset packaging conventions to facilitate fair model evaluation.

Applications and adoption include research environments, voice assistants, educational technology, accessibility tools, contact centers, and media production. By providing common data formats and APIs, it aims to reduce integration costs and accelerate experimentation across ASR, TTS, and SLU domains.

Status and governance: As a generic concept, Speechrich does not correspond to a single commercial product but to an ongoing community-driven initiative. Its governance models, licensing terms, and reference implementations vary across projects that adopt the Speechrich specifications.