Racine, Wis.-based Perceptral has been selected by the U.S. Army to receive a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract. Under the pending $70,000 award, Perceptral will be engaged for a six-month study to prove the feasibility of applying the company’s proprietary methods of sound segmentation and speech compression to the reconstruction of a meaningful signal from highly degraded or otherwise compromised digital sound transmissions.

This is a novel application of Perceptral’s in-house technology that is currently being used to produce high-quality, variable-speed speech synthesis for training environments, under SBIR Phase I and Phase I Option contracts totaling $150,000, awarded to the company by the U.S. Navy in 2008 and 2009. A Phase II award under that previous project is anticipated to begin early 2010. Should Perceptral’s Army Phase I be deemed successful, a four-month Phase I Option for an additional $50,000 may be awarded, in anticipation of a possible two-year Phase II contract to develop the company’s solution into a prototype.

Perceptral's approach to sound segmentation holds great promise for revolutionizing the handling of speech prosody in a wide range of applications. A direct result is enhanced functionality for speech analysis and synthesis, novel methods of sound compression and reconstruction, and advanced handling of prosody, including speech rate, intonation, accent and dialect, and vocal timbre. Intended products include improved text-to-speech applications, automated speech dubbing in multiple accents and languages, pedagogical tools for accent reduction and acquisition, prosthetic voices, and animated voices for the entertainment industry.

The Small Business Innovation Research program provides more than $2 billion per year in small contracts and grants to American-based small businesses through a highly competitive three-tiered process. Phase I awards (in the range of $100,000 for a six-month effort) have historically been reserved for small-scale feasibility studies of highly promising and innovative ideas, targeted to resolving long-standing or high-priority problems that have not been sufficiently tackled by traditional large business and university attempts. This is so-called high-risk/high-reward seed funding that is virtually unavailable to independent researchers, entrepreneurs, and small businesses outside of SBIR and similar programs.

Phase II is follow-on research to develop the best of these Phase I ideas into full-fledged prototypes. Phase IIs are typically awarded in the range of $750,000 for two years’ effort. Those firms that are successful at Phase II are encouraged and facilitated to pursue private investors or other commercial sources of funding to bring their products to market. For their part, the sponsoring agencies receive royalty-free access to the promising new technologies that are developed under SBIR, while the small businesses retain full rights to develop their products commercially or to license them for profit.

For more information about Perceptral or the Small Business Innovation Research program, contact us at: info@perceptral.com.