Syrinx

Syrinx Speech Systems was an Australian company who developed automated telephone dialogue systems with their own speech recogniser.  I joined Syrinx early 1999 as head of the Natural Language Processing group to lead the new NLP Research & Development project, which was partly funded by a DIST R&D Start Grant (STG00217, 1999-2000). 

The aim of the NLP project was to design and implement a natural language telephone dialogue system integrated with the Large Vocabulary Speech Recogniser developed by Syrinx.  This was achieved within the time frame of the project and an operational version of the system went into production in July 2001. However Syrinx Speech Systems went into voluntary administration in September 2001 and was liquidated soon afterwards.

During development, the NLP component was named SYLAN and early versions of the system were demonstrated at the following venues:

·         OZCHI'2000. Sydney, December 2000. See (Berry & Estival, 2000. pdf)

·         RIAO'2000. Paris, April 2000.

·         Call Centre Solutions.  Sydney, November 1999.

The SYLAN system is described in detail in:

Dominique Estival (2002). “The Syrinx Spoken Language System”. International Journal of Speech Technology. Vol.5. no.1. pp.85-96. (pdf)

I gave a number of presentations on the Syrinx NLP project:

  • D. Estival. "The Syrinx Spoken Language System", ANLP-01. Macquarie University, Sydney. April 2001.
  • D. Estival. "The Syrinx Language Processing Project'', Dept. of Computer Science, University of Melbourne. 6/06/00.
  • D. Estival. "The Syrinx Language Processing Project: automated spoken dialogue for over-the-phone transaction systems''.  Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), Canberra. 26/05/00.
  • D. Estival. "SYLAN: the Syrinx spoken language processing system". University of Western Sydney. 21/03/00.
  • D. Estival. "SYLAN, the Syrinx spoken language system'', Sydney University. 08/10/99.
  • D. Estival. "SYLAN, the Syrinx spoken language system'', HAIL Seminar, CSIRO. 05/10/99.

In June 2001, I was invited to give a talk at the Colloquium on "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Language Processing Colloquium" hosted by The Centre for Research in Language Processing & Linguistics at the University of Queensland. Here is the presentation.

 

Research

In 2000, Dr Dominique Estival (Syrinx), A.Prof Diana Slade (UTS) and A.Prof Christian Matthiessen (Macquarie) were awarded a “Strategic Partnership with Industry - Research and Training” (SPIRT) project (ARC: C00106858) for a joint project between Syrinx, the University of Technology Sydney and Macquarie University, titled “Modelling the melody of human speech: profiling intonation for automated telephone system".

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