The Center for Voice Intelligence and Security (CVIS) engages in developing,
deploying and securing technologies that tap into
the information-bearing capacity of human voice. It also engages in educational activities, including short-term courses for visitors, regular courses and training programs.
CVIS focuses on three main areas of research:
Voice Intelligence
The human voice carries an immense amount of information. Inherently, it carries information about the speaker. Further information -- both about the speaker, and the world as perceived and understood by the speaker -- is superimposed on it using language. Voice Intelligence is simply the process of distilling all of this information for use by machines -- largely computing machines with intelligence of their own.
Thus voice intelligence would involve technologies that range from discerning the speaker's physical, physiological, psychological and other aspects from voice (the science of profiling humans from their voice), to understanding the content of human vocalizations and speech in various contexts.
There are myriad applications of voice intelligence technologies. Information derived from voice can be used to enable healthcare applications, security applications, personal convenience applications, communication enhancement for retail, entertainment, interactive robotics, and much more, including manufacturing control. Our projects cover some of these application areas, and we invite collaborations on starting new ones with our group at CVIS. More information about these, including who to contact, can be found on this website .
Voice Security
Technologies for voice security focus on protecting information in voice data and securing voice communications. Research areas under voice security include voice encryption, voice steganography, voice transformation, voice synthesis, privacy preserving voice processing, anti-surveillance technologies and many more. Different subsets of these are used by different applications to protect the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of voice data within them.
As voice interfaces become more prevalent in devices ranging from smartphones to smart home devices, the importance of voice security continues to grow. There is a growing need for standards, guidelines, and laws relating to voice security, to protect individuals' privacy and ensure the responsible use of these technologies. We include specific technologies for these under Voice security as well.
You can learn more about CVIS projects related to voice security from this website .
Basic Research
For all the science of the past centuries, human voice still remains unexplored from several perspectives. It is also not fully understood from an information-theoretic perspective. Its effects are not fully documented, its range is unknown, its variations are not categorized, its relationship to the DNA, to anthropometric entities, to the bones, skull structure and facial structure etc is not fully explored, its evolution over time, its variation through ethnic divisions is not mapped... this list goes on. Draw a graph with an unlabeled x-axis and a y-axis labeled "variation," and we find that for anything that is not relatable to a single speaker, with any label on the x-axis, there is little data to populate the graph.
At CVIS we are finding ways to explore some of these unknowns. There are no specific applications that are targeted here. This is fundamental research for the furtherment of science and scientifc knowledge. Some of our findings are documented on this website.