A PC-based real-time large vocabulary continuous speech recognizer for German

A large vocabulary speech recognizer for German is presented. The main properties of the recognizer are speaker independence, continuous speech input and real-time operation. It is integrated into a client/server framework, which allows for simple porting between different hard- and software platforms. Methods like simplified language model spreading in beam search and specialized word-begin and -end modelling are introduced in order to achieve real-time operation on a Pentium-based PC. Recognition tests for two different dictation applications (controlled speech newspaper dictation and spontaneous speech medical dictation) are presented showing the importance of adding efforts in the modelling of spontaneous speech