Small microphone array design and processing for speech recognition of vocal orders in restaurants.

Veovox is a project led by a swiss company Veovox® in collaboration with swiss research institutes whose purpose is to market an order-taking device, enabling a waiter in a restaurant to take orders by voice. With this device, the waiter only needs to pronounce the order to a personal digital assistant (PDA), which directly translates the voice order into text through an integrated voice recognition engine. The text is then submitted to the restaurant management software solution for further processing. We present here the developed audio processing system of a such device developed by the LEMA. In the context of a more or less noisy restaurant composed of distributed parasitic speakers and diffuse noise (cocktail noise), the developed audio processing consists in enhancing the speech of the waiter from the recorded audio signal in order to provide a high quality signal to the recognition engine.