Samstag, 26. Dezember 2009

SSC: Large scale sample acquisition

Two new applications have joined the simon application suite: ssc and sscd.

ssc stands for Simon Sample Collector and is specifially designed for large scale sample acquisition.

sscd is the central data server which it's data in a MySQL database (no graphical frontend).

ssc is the graphical client that records the samples, manages the users and institutions and uploads the data to the server.

We use the software to collect samples in various medical institution (rehabilitation clinics mostly at the moment) for further analysis. Every user of the software has a quite extensive profile which stores birth year, education, mothers tongue, diagnosis and other relevant factors that may influence the speech.



The system allows the user to create "institution" (the clinic for example) and associate users with zero or many institutions.

ssc users are not interchangable with simon users (more information) and there is no attempt to creating speech models with ssc / sscd. Those tools are simple data-acquisition tools and probably only useful if you are a speech researcher who wants to gather data from a lot of speakers. Then, however, it is a neat little utility that works very well for our uses already.

simon scenarios

First of all: Merry Christmas to everybody!

Some of you might still remember that back when simon 0.2 was released, I talked about modularizing the recognition into smaller "packages" or "scenarios". Well this features has been implemented now and is almost ready.

The idea is to provide pre-defined application packages (like default values on steroids) as well as the ability to create such packages and share them with the community easily. This should significantly improve our biggest weakness: The time it takes a new user to get started with simon.

To show you what I mean, I created a little screencast that shows the current development version of simon in action: