Sony has recently posted a new job opening over LinkedIn page, which gives the idea that the company is looking to hire an engineer who may possibly add voice recognition to the next generation of PlayStation products. The title of the job is “Speed Recognition Engineering Intern,” and the successful candidate will be accountable for developing signal processing and speech detection in noisy surroundings. Although the listing did not describe any specific hardware or platform on which the new employee will work but it is highly likely that the new hire will work on the forthcoming PlayStation 4. However, it is noteworthy to mention here that Sony has already revealed the system back in February, when the attendees had a good look at the new lightbar and the latest DualShock 4 controller of the device that incorporates a dual-camera PlayStation 4 Eye peripheral.
Sony is not the first game console manufacturer that seems to be looking to add voice recognition to its products, as has integrated a similar technology in its Xbox 360. Therefore, it was expected that sooner or later Sony will also integrate the same technology in its game console. Here is the full description of the job listing that Sony posted:
“Job Description
The summer intern will help the team support its regular activities by doing engineering tasks that can be supervised / evaluated by another person on the team. The position requires certain traits; however some traits will be acquired / trained while employee is on the job.
This position will require some previous knowledge of speech recognition and signal processing with high motivation and ability to work independently for some periods of time. The required performed tasks include (but not limited to) speech noise reduction, speech detection, recognition, noisy rejection, and grammar processing under various environments.
Principle Duties/Responsibilities
– Robust speech feature extraction and signal processing for speech enhancement.
– Speech enhance and processing of noisy speech with human voice in the background.
– Engage some initial research off signal separation and neural network processing.
– Run evaluation and research on keyword spotting.
– Conduct some experiment on robust small vocabulary CSR with noisy speech.
Desired Skills & Experience
Required Knowledge/Skills
– Previous course and research on speech recognition, including HMM and neural network.
– Solid signal processing background background.
– Solid C/C++ programming.
Preferred Knowledge/Skills:
– Emotional and kid’s speech processing – a plus
– Past experience with LVCSR – a plus
– Grammar for CSR and knowledge of multiple languages – a plus.”