mENUNCIATE: Development of a computer-aided pronunciation training system on a cross-platform framework for mobile, speech-enabled application development

This paper presents our ongoing research in the field of speech-enabled multimodal, mobile application development. We have developed a multimodal framework that enables cross-platform development using open standards-based HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This framework brings high extendibility through plugin-based architecture and provides scalable REST-based speech services in the cloud to support large amounts of requests from mobile devices. This paper describes the architecture and implementation of the framework, and the development of a mobile computer-aided pronunciation training application for Chinese learners of English, named mENUNCIATE, based on this framework. We also report a preliminary performance evaluation on mENUNCIATE.