Speech system barge in control

摘要

A speech system has a speech input channel (11) including a speech recogniser, and a speech output channel (12) including a text-to-speech converter (6). Associated with the input channel is a barge-in control (29) for setting barge-in behaviour parameters determining how the apparatus handles barge-in by a user during speech output by the apparatus. In order to make the barge-in control more responsive to the actual speech output from the output channel, a barge-in prediction arrangement (56; 41,43) is provided that is responsive to feature values produced during the operation of the text-to-speech converter (6) to produce indications as to the most likely barge-in points. The barge-in control (29) is responsive to these indications to adjust at least one of the barge-in behaviour parameters for periods corresponding to the most likely barge-in points.