speech recognition

application (Or voice recognition) The identification of

spoken words by a machine. The spoken words are digitised

(turned into sequence of numbers) and matched against coded

dictionaries in order to identify the words.

Most systems must be "trained," requiring samples of all the

actual words that will be spoken by the user of the system.

The sample words are digitised, stored in the computer and

used to match against future words. More sophisticated

systems require voice samples, but not of every word. The

system uses the voice samples in conjunction with dictionaries

of larger vocabularies to match the incoming words. Yet other

systems aim to be "speaker-independent", i.e. they will

recognise words in their vocabulary from any speaker without

training.

Another variation is the degree with which systems can cope

with connected speech. People tend to run words together,

e.g. "next week" becomes "neksweek" (the "t" is dropped). For

a voice recognition system to identify words in connected

speech it must take into account the way words are modified by

the preceding and following words.

It has been said (in 1994) that computers will need to be

something like 1000 times faster before large vocabulary (a

few thousand words), speaker-independent, connected speech

voice recognition will be feasible.

(1995-05-05)