About us

Simon Listens is an in Austrian, registered non-profit research association (DVR: 597483321) for the development, distribution and implementation of the speech recognition software Simon.

The organization Simon Listens is situated in the district of Leibnitz, Austria, and operates worldwide, though it mainly focuses on Styria, a federal territory of Austria and Europe.

The non-profit research association sees itself as a platform for research and development of different solutions and applications ? cases with the speech recognition software Simon for physically handicapped people and other target groups (which are still to be defined) to whom this software, published under a general public license, can guarantee a social benefit.

Simon listens has developed the following software tools:

Open Source speech recognition “simon“

with the special application “Basic autonomy” (see folder )

Ssc - simon sample collector

Ssc is a tool for large scale sample acquisition. Using ssc, multiple teams can gather training data from potential end users or from professional speakers and collect it on the central sscd server.

This is an excellent tool for collecting Italian speech data especially for the ASTROMOBILE project.

Sam - simon acoustic modeller

Sam is a tool for creating and testing acoustic models. It can compile new speech models, use models created by simon and even produce models that can be used by simon later on. We will use this tool to create different speech models as planned within the ASTROMOBILE project.

What motivates us

The name “Simon” comes from “Speech Interface daeMON” whichrefers to Service and Speech. It was developed within the context of the European project  "e-inclusion" for physically disabled people to give them the possibility to chat, to write e-mails, to surf the internet, to do internet-banking and much more. Although Simon is an open-source speech recognition program for replacing the mouse and keyboard, it is very flexible and allows customization for any application where speech recognition is needed.

The ASTROMOBILE experiment perfectly fits our goals of “e-inclusion” and enabling speech recognition for robots is a very challenging topic.