Team Wins Siemens Prize For Speech Analyzer
NPR's Melissa Block talks to Matthew Fernandez, the high school junior from Oregon who, along with his partner, Akash Krishnan, won the team prize in the 2010 Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology. Fernandez and Krishnan built a computer algorithm that analyzes speech and figures out the emotional state of the speaker. Fernandez says the technology could improve service at call centers, where irate customers could be quickly recognized by the computer's phone menu and quickly put through to a human. It could also be used to help autistic children better understand the emotion of someone speaking to them.