In May the chapter met to hear Dr. Hans-Joachim Kolb, chief executive officer of MEDAV Ltd, Uttenreuth Germany, to speak about speech recognition technologies for reconnaissance applications. Those technologies have been subject to research and theoretical discussion for many years. Now applications are available which can significantly enhance human reconnaissance processing, Kolb stated. By combining unstructured voice data with structured meta data being deduced from the recognition process, subsequent signal processing like language recognition, speaker classification and key word recognition can be automated. So pre-processing of huge amount of data is feasible for final evaluation by human voice analysts. Kolb presented the theoretical background of the applied technolgy and solution in use. Although there are still limits and restrictions which prevent fully automated speech recognition, the performance of those systems will improve with computer power in the future, the author concluded in his presentation.

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