Applications of very-low-cost small vocabulary connected word recognition

Although electronic components for computer-like operations are becoming cheaper, it is still possible to make the final product cost and power requirements much lower by using less computationally-intensive processing. In fact, if the processing is made simple enough there is scope for it all to be combined into a single application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), and extremely low unit manufacturing cost is then possible in mass production. For these reasons computation in the recognizer described has been kept to a minimum: the speech is digitized by a standard telephony A-law codec chip, and all the signal processing and pattern matching is performed on a single 6502 8-bit microprocessor. Even in very small quantities without any customization, the component cost per unit is thus only a few tens of pounds