Alt-i: Talking Drums & Speech recognition

Túndé Adégbölá writes in Ictupdate:

Because research efforts in the field of speech recognition began with English, a non-tone language, most attention is given to the recognition of consonants and vowels. At Alt-i, however, we found that if tones are accurately recognized they can suggest the vowels that bear them and the consonants that they accompany. Interestingly, tones are a lot easier to recognize than vowels and consonants.Such features are common among many African tone languages. It is likely that tools and techniques can be developed and shared for other languages, including Asian tone languages too. We are aware of the pressing needs of many other African languages and we are approaching the development of this product in such a way that will make it relatively easy to adapt to other African tone languages in the near future.