The SESAR Innovation Days took place in Seville, Spain from November 27 to 30, 2023. One of the highlights on the first day of paper presentations (Nov 28) was the technical session on “Speech Recognition” with three scientific presentations. The session was chaired by Georg Trausmuth (Frequentis) from 11:30 am to 1 pm.
Two papers from the HAAWAII project and one further paper authored from the HAAWAII technical team gave an overview on the issues of speech recognition, speech understanding, and remaining challenges to be solved for industrialization of such technologies in air traffic management. Mrinmoy Bhattacharjee (Idiap) presented an “Automatic Speech Analysis Framework for ATC Communication in HAAWAII” and how to do the “Customization of Automatic Speech Recognition Engines for Rare Word Detection Without Costly Model Re-Training”. Prof. Dr. Hartmut Helmke (DLR), the former lead of the HAAWAII project, explained “The HAAWAII Framework for Automatic Speech Understanding of Air Traffic Communication”.