Comparison of GMM and fuzzy-GMM applied to phoneme classification

The increasing need for more natural human machine interfaces has generated intensive research work directed toward designing and implementing natural speech enabled systems. Because it is very hard to constrain a speaker when expressing a voice-based request, speech recognition systems have to be able to handle out of vocabulary words in the users speech utterance. In this paper, we investigate an approach that can be deployed in keyword spotting systems. We propose a phoneme classifier that will be ultimately used to provide confidence values to be compared against existing Automatic Speech Recognizer word confidences. The end goal is to build a keyword spotting system for natural language speech. The presented approach is based on fuzzy gaussian mixture modeling to carry out the English phonemes classification.