TNO Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research
Partner Contributions
- Commercially exploitable speech transcription tools for the languages English, Dutch and German
- Expert experience in audio segmentation and technology evaluation
TNO is a not-for-profit contract research organisation located in The Netherlands. With approximately 5000 employees the organisation covers knowledge in a wide range of applicable technology. TNO was established by law in 1930 to support companies and governments with innovative, practicable knowledge. The organisation has recently be re-organized into five core areas. The Human Factors research laboratory in Soesterberg is one of five business units in the core area of Defence, Security and Safety. In this laboratory, research is carried out to optimize the performance of humans in a technical environment. One of the technologies that is capable of increasing human performance is speech technology. TNO has a long history in speech communication, perception and technology evaluation, with the EU sponsored projects ESPRIT SAM and SQALE as examples in which it played an important role. Since a decade, TNO has been developing its own speech technologies, which included the development of a word spotter and large vocabulary speech recognition system for Dutch, a text-independent speaker recognition system and a text and speaker independent language recognition system. TNO has participated and is still participating in the speech technology related EU sponsored projects InDiCo, SAFESOUND and AMI.