Toshiba has three R&D groups for speech technology: one in Kawasaki, Japan, one in Cambridge, the UK, and one in Beijing, China. They are closely working to contribute to products and services in Toshiba. In my talk, I will introduce visions shared in the groups, the global R&D groups, and some of the speech recognition and synthesis methods developed by the groups. I will also talk about Toshiba's products and services that use speech technologies.
Masami Akamine received the B.E. degree in electrical engineering from University of the Ryukyus in 1979 and the M.E. and the Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Tohoku University in 1982 and 1985, respectively. Since 1985 he has been with the Corporate Research & Development Center, Toshiba Corporation. He is currently a Senior Fellow, responsible for managing research groups in Kawasaki Japan, Cambridge UK and Beijing China. His research interests include speech coding, speech synthesis, automatic speech recognition and their applications. He has more than 50 patents. He invented the closed-loop training method of speech units that inspired the minimum generation error training of HMM-TTS. He contributed to Toshiba TTS systems that dominate more than 90% of Japanese car navigation market. He was awarded as an outstanding researcher by the Minister of Education, Science and Technology Japan in 2001 and has been awarded several prizes including the Best Paper Award from IEICE of Japan and the Prime Minister’s Prize from the Japan Institute of Invention and Innovation. He is a member of IEICE and ASJ, and a senior member of IEEE.
