Moving Speech

Willie Walker, champion of Open Source speech recognition and synthesis technology at Sun Labs, has transferred to Sun's Accessibility team.

January 4, 2005 - Sun has always led the charge for open access to information and services, including access for people with disabilities. And technology transfer has always been central to the mission of Sun Microsystems Laboratories (Sun Labs). The recent transfer of Willie Walker from the Labs into Sun's Accessibility Program Office (APO) is a success story on both fronts.

As an employee of Sun Microsystems Laboratories (Sun Labs) for the past six years, Mr. Walker has been instrumental in the development of two technologies that are critical to accessibility: speech recognition and speech synthesis. Now, as a newly anointed member of Sun's Accessibility Program Office (APO), Mr. Walker will make these core assistive technologies more accessible to Sun's product groups.

"Technology transfer is our ultimate objective," said Glenn Edens, Director of Sun Labs. "We are more than a fountainhead of ideas. We develop technologies that are relevant and that have the potential to solve real customer problems. Willie Walker's transfer to the APO is a shining example of why Sun leads the industry in moving ideas from the drawing board into products that are successful in the marketplace."

Transferring Talent and Technology

At Sun Labs, Mr. Walker was a central figure in the development of two Open Source projects that now hold considerable promise for commercial product development.

FreeTTS: A speech synthesizer written entirely in the Java programming language. FreeTTS is based upon Flite, a small run-time speech synthesis engine developed at Carnegie Mellon University (Flite is derived from the Festival Speech Synthesis System from the University of Edinburgh and the FestVox project from Carnegie Mellon University). FreeTTS provides partial support for the Java Speech API (JSAPI) specification, and can serve as a back-end text-to-speech (TTS) engine that works with a speech/telephony system or does the heavy lifting for a wireless PDA. It can also be used as a desktop/workstation TTS engine. More than 100,000 people have downloaded FreeTTS from sourceforge.net.

Sphinx-4: A state-of-the-art, continuous speech, speaker-independent recognition engine. Also written entirely in Java, Sphinx-4 enhances and expands the capabilities of groundbreaking Sphinx-3 and Sphinx-2 speech recognition systems developed by CMU, adding flexibility, modularity, and a framework for universal acceptance of various grammars and language and acoustical models.

With Mr. Walker's transfer to the APO, these technologies--and Mr. Walker's talents--move from the research lab to the domain of applied research. Mr. Walker will continue developing the technologies, but with a focus on making them more robust and thereby broadening their potential for commercial products.

Open Source, Open Participation

The development of FreeTTS and Sphinx-4 underscore the uniquely collaborative approach Sun Labs brings to technology transfer. Sun Labs and its research partners Carnegie Mellon University, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, the MIT Media Lab, and many others have all contributed significantly under the Open Source model.

"With Open Source, research and innovation is encouraged and nurtured rather than hidden," said Mr. Walker. "Input and ideas from all interested parties are welcome. I greatly value the time and expertise many talented individuals--both in universities and in private enterprise--have lent to the development of FreeTTS and Sphinx-4. In particular, I'd like to thank my small team of Paul Lamere and Philip Kwok for their contributions and Sun Labs management for their support of the speech projects."

Accessibility at Sun has Roots in the Labs

The high level of collaboration and broad participation is expected to continue now that Mr. Walker is part of Sun's Accessibility Program Office. In fact, the APO has its roots in Sun Labs from the early 1990s, when Earl Johnson was hired by Sun Labs to focus on accessibility for Sun's platforms. When the APO was formally established in 1997, Mr. Johnson hired Willie Walker and Peter Korn to design and develop the Java Accessibility API. Upon completion of that work, Willie joined Sun Labs to focus on speech technologies.

Today, the APO's mission is to make Sun's platforms and associated products accessible to people with disabilities. The mission is accomplished through a variety of activities, including software development and outreach and consulting with product groups both inside and outside Sun. Through their hard work, the APO has also become a thought leader for the entire accessibility industry.

Mr. Walker is re-joining the team not only to carry the speech technology work forward, but also to help drive the development of assistive technologies for Sun's platforms. The existing team members include:

Michele Budris: Program management

Rich Burridge: Accessibility test tools

Harry Burks: Group manager

Earl Johnson: Program management (and team founder)

Peter Korn: Accessibility architect

Lynn Monsanto: Java accessibility development

About Sun Labs

Established in 1990, Sun Microsystems Laboratories is the applied research and advanced development arm of Sun Microsystems, Inc., with locations in California and Massachusetts. Sun Labs is one of the ways Sun invests in the future, and is responsible for many of the technology advancements and inventions that have made Sun a technology powerhouse including asynchronous and high-speed circuits, optical interconnects, 3rd-generation Web technologies, sensors, network scaling and Java technologies. Although many companies have R&D groups, Sun Labs can claim one of the highest rates of technology transfer in the industry.