Activities of Interactive Speech Technology Consortium (ISTC) targeting open software development for MMI systems

Interactive Speech Technology Consortium (ISTC), established on November 2003 after three years activity of the Galatea project supported by Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA) of Japan, aims at supporting open-source free software development of multi-modal interaction (MMI) for human-like agents. The software named Galatea-toolkit developed by 24 researchers of 16 research institutes in Japan includes a Japanese speech recognition engine, a Japanese speech synthesis engine, and a facial image synthesis engine used for developing an anthropomorphic agent, as well as dialogue manager that can integrates multiple modalities, interprets them, and decides an action with differentiating it to multiple media of voice and facial expression. ISTC provides members a one-day technical seminar and one-week training course to master Galatea-toolkit, as well as a software set (CDROM) every year.