A decoder for large vocabulary continuous short message dictation on embedded devices

We present our recent progress towards implementing large vocabulary continuous SMS dictation in embedded devices. The dictation engine we describe here is based on the popular finite state transducer paradigm and is capable of handling large vocabularies and high order n-gram language models in a small memory footprint - even relative to what is available in current high end devices such as the Nokia N800 Internet tablet and the N95 Symbian phone. We illustrate the performance of the engine on a 20k vocabulary Chinese Mandarin dictation task which requires less than 10Mb RAM memory to run on the device. The accuracy of the continuous engine is similar to the accuracy of the isolated word dictation engine we have previously developed.