A new system for continuous speech recognition - preliminary results

A speaker dependent system for recognizing carefully articulated continuous speech is described. The system accepts English sentences composed from a 127 word vocabulary appropriate to an airline information reservation task. The system is controlled by a finite state parser which generates word candidates and established their temporal locations in hypothetical sentences. The word candidates are evaluated by an LPC distance measure and a dynamic programming algorithm which nonlinearly time aligns isolated word reference templates with the input speech stream. The input is recognized as the hypothetical sentence having the lowest distance according to a well-defined criterion. In a preliminary test based on 100 sentences spoken over dialed up telephone lines by two male talkers, 90% word accuracy, resulting in 75% sentence recognition, was achieved.