Newborns cry intensely, and most parents struggle to understand the reason behind their crying, as the baby cannot verbally express their needs. This makes it challenging for parents to know if their child has a need or a health issue. An embedded solution based on a Raspberry Pi is presented to address this problem. The module analyzes audio techniques to capture, analyze, classify, and remotely monitor a baby’s cries. These techniques rely on prosodic and cepstral features, such as MFCC coefficients. They can differentiate the reason behind a baby’s cry, such as hunger, stomach pain, or discomfort. A machine learning model was trained to anticipate the reason based on audio features. The embedded system includes a microphone to capture real-time cries and a display screen to show the anticipated reason. In addition, the system sends the collected data to a web server for storage, enabling remote monitoring and more detailed data analysis. A cell phone application has also been developed to notify parents in real time of why their baby is crying. This application enables parents to adapt quickly and efficiently to their infant’s needs, even when they are not around.

Current speech recognition systems with fixed vocabularies have difficulties recognizing Out-of-Vocabulary words (OOVs) such as proper nouns and new words. This leads to misunderstandings or even failures in dialog systems. Ensuring effective speech recognition is crucial for the proper functioning of robot assistants. Non-native accents, new vocabulary, and aging voices can cause malfunctions in a speech recognition system. If this task is not executed correctly, the assistant robot will inevitably produce false or random responses. In this paper, we used a statistical approach based on distance algorithms to improve OOV correction. We developed a post-processing algorithm to be combined with a speech recognition model. In this sense, we compared two distance algorithms: Damerau–Levenshtein and Levenshtein distance. We validated the performance of the two distance algorithms in conjunction with five off-the-shelf speech recognition models. Damerau–Levenshtein, as compared to the Levenshtein distance algorithm, succeeded in minimizing the Word Error Rate (WER) when using the MoroccanFrench test set with five speech recognition systems, namely VOSK API, Google API, Wav2vec2.0, SpeechBrain, and Quartznet pre-trained models. Our post-processing method works regardless of the architecture of the speech recognizer, and its results on our MoroccanFrench test set outperformed the five chosen off-the-shelf speech recognizer systems.

Artificial intelligence-based speech recognition systems are already available and capable of recognizing the French language. Still, it is quite time-consuming to compare which one will be effective for an assistant robot. The study aims to select the best French-language speech recognition system with the least error in a real environment. In this paper, we present related works on how an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system works, the models used by each of its components, several open-source French datasets, and the frequently used evaluation techniques. Next, we compare deep learning-based speech recognition APIs and pre-trained models for French on two different datasets using the Word Error Rate (WER) metric. The experimental results reveal that Google's Speech-to-Text API outperforms the other systems, namely VOSK API, Wav2vec 2.0, QuartzNet, and Speech Brain's Convolutional, Recurrent, and Fully-connected Networks (CRDNN) model.