Speaker Independent Urdu speech recognition using HMM

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is one of the advanced fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Recent past has witnessed valuable research activities in ASR in English, European and East Asian languages. But unfortunately South Asian Languages in general and ¿Urdu¿ in particular have received very less attention. In this paper we present an approach to develop an ASR system for Urdu language. The proposed system is based on an open source speech recognition framework called Sphinx4 which uses statistical based approach (Hidden Markov Model) for developing ASR system. We present a Speaker Independent ASR system for small sized vocabulary, i.e. fifty two isolated most spoken Urdu words and suggest that this research work will form the basis to develop medium and large size vocabulary Urdu speech recognition system.