Mere power and multiple speakers aren't enough to make a high fidelity sound system, however.
Running speaker wire around a room to multiple speakers is not everyone's idea of attractive home décor.
When multiple speakers are set up around a house, music can be sent to all of them simultaneously, or different tracks can be sent to different rooms.
(No, the program still can't transcribe interviews; no software can. That task, where multiple speakers are talking colloquially with no punctuation, far from the microphone, is still too daunting a task).
This means that the time during which multiple speakers are speaking simultaneously is rather long in the data.
While various particle filtering methods have been applied to the problem of tracking a single speaker, the extension of these techniques to the case of multiple speakers is not straightforward.
In the case at hand with multiple microphones and multiple speakers to be supported, the sensor signals have to be combined in a beneficial way.
The fact that each of the multiple speakers had been ordered to repeat in turn "I ask you to accept this invitation" added to the feeling that it was only the utmost self-control which was stopping them all bursting into a chorus of "Permit Me to Entertain You".
Speech data from multiple speakers has been used to confirm speaker-independency.
The problem of tracking multiple intermittently speaking speakers is difficult as some distinct problems must be addressed.
