A distributed architecture for robust automatic speech recognition

In this paper, we attempt to decompose a state-of-the-art speech recognition system into its components and define an infrastructure that allows a flexible, efficient and effective interaction among the components. Motivated by the success of DARPA Communicator program, we select the open source Galaxy architecture as our development test bed. It consists of a hub that allows communication among servers connected to it by message passing and supports the plug-and-play paradigm. In addition to message passing it supports high bandwidth data (binary or audio) transfer between servers via a brokering scheme. For several reasons, we believe that it is the right time to start developing a distributed framework for speech recognition along with data and protocol standards supporting interoperability. We present our work towards that goal using the Colorado University (CU) Sonic recognizer. We divide Sonic into a number of components and structure it around the Hub. We describe the system in some detail and report on its present status with some possibilities for future development.