Speech technologies have been developed for decades as a typical signal processing area, while the last decade has brought a huge progress based on new machine learning paradigms. Owing not only to their intrinsic complexity but also to their relation with cognitive sciences, speech technologies are now viewed as a prime example of interdisciplinary knowledge area. This review article on speech signal analysis and processing, corresponding machine learning algorithms, and applied computational intelligence aims to give an insight into several fields, covering speech production and auditory perception, cognitive aspects of speech communication and language understanding, both speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis in more details, and consequently the main directions in development of spoken dialogue systems. Additionally, the article discusses the concepts and recent advances in speech signal compression, coding, and transmission, including cognitive speech coding. To conclude, the main intention of this article is to highlight recent achievements and challenges based on new machine learning paradigms that, over the last decade, had an immense impact in the field of speech signal processing.

Finding new ways to cost-effectively facilitate population screening and improve cancer diagnoses at an early stage supported by data-driven AI models provides unprecedented opportunities to reduce cancer related mortality. This work presents the INCISIVE project initiative towards enhancing AI solutions for health imaging by unifying, harmonizing, and securely sharing scattered cancer-related data to ensure large datasets which are critically needed to develop and evaluate trustworthy AI models. The adopted solutions of the INCISIVE project have been outlined in terms of data collection, harmonization, data sharing, and federated data storage in compliance with legal, ethical, and FAIR principles. Experiences and examples feature breast cancer data integration and mammography collection, indicating the current progress, challenges, and future directions.

This paper presents a Voice Assistant, an Android based personal assistant application for mobile phones, allowing voice control for the Serbian language. The native interface is provided for a large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system based on the open-source Kaldi speech recognition toolkit. Several acoustic models were trained using a database of about 70000 utterances, by adding different amount of noise. The results are provided for a test database of about 4500 utterances and a test vocabulary of more than 14000 words.