The present invention pertains to a method intended to slow a digital audio signal to enable effective real-time spoken communication between people who are speaking a language that at least one of those people is not completely fluent in.
One of the most frustrating experiences is being unable to understand a speaker whose language is different. It is common to encounter difficulties understanding a language that is foreign to us. However, an essential part of human interaction is to listen, understand, and communicate with others. The world is becoming globalized, and opportunities to communicate with people who speak different languages are increasing. Linguistic diversity among a company's employees, to take an example, poses a variety of challenges.
Languages differ in the phonemes they employ, which naturally creates difficulties when faced with a foreign language. Spoken language omits many elements and relies on the situation in which a conversation takes place. There are many grammatical errors due to the simultaneity of thinking and speaking. Most frequently, a background noise becomes mixed with spoken words. This is particularly illustrated by the difficulty that voice recognition computer systems have at recognizing human language. All of these obstacles require thinking effort by the person who is listening, which hinders his or her instant understanding and may cause him or her to lose the thread of the conversation.
For example, people who need to communicate around the world today do so mainly with the English language. Unfortunately, their skills with that language are not the same, and it is often very difficult to understand English spoken quickly by a native speaker. The problem is therefore to slow down talking speed without any chance of losing the meaning of the discussion and while remaining in transparent interactive communication.
Solutions for slowing down speech have existed for several years. However, they have an intrinsic secondary effect of causing the conversation to take longer. This disrupts communication, which becomes tedious, with the risk of breaking down. These solutions are applied without drawbacks for broadcast events (TV, web, etc.), but are not acceptable for interactive communication. If this slowdown were only applied for the person who is less at ease with the language being used, the more fluent speaker would have to wait for the end of the slow transmission of his or her question to obtain a response. This makes interactivity in the exchange problematic.