Golden Mandarin (I)-A real-time Mandarin speech dictation machine for Chinese language with very large vocabulary

The first successfully implemented real-time Mandarin dictation machine, which recognizes Mandarin speech with very large vocabulary and almost unlimited texts for the input of Chinese characters into computers, is described. The machine is speaker-dependent, and the input speech is in the form of sequences of isolated syllables. The machine can be decomposed into two subsystems. The first subsystem recognizes the syllables using hidden Markov models. Because every syllable can represent many different homonym characters and form different multisyllabic words with syllables on its right or left, the second subsystem is needed to identify the exact characters from the syllables and correct the errors in syllable recognition. The real-time implementation is on an IBM PC/AT, connected to three sets of specially designed hardware boards on which seven TMS 320C25 chips operate in parallel. The preliminary test results indicate that it takes only about 0.45 s to dictate a syllable (or character) with an accuracy on the order of 90%