Word-recognition machine

An equipment that is capable of recognising the digits 0¿9, spoken by a wide range of speakers, is described. Recognition scores of the order of 95% are achieved for male speakers of British origin. It is suggested that, in a phoneme-based recognition scheme, improvements in feature extraction are of greater importance than the optimisation of decision strategies. Future improvements must depend on the wider use of adaptation by the machine to the talker, and the forms this adaptation might take are discussed.