Surfin´ the World Wide Web with Japanese

Previously, we have developed Speech-Aware Multimedia (SAM) which controls a WWW browser using English speech. We have extended its capability to use Japanese speech to browse Japanese pages, and developed a prototype using speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition with Japanese context-dependent phonetic models. Some challenges not seen in English include: segregation of Japanese text into word units for optional silence insertion, Japanese text to phone conversion and accommodation of English link names embedded in Japanese pages. In order to accomplish the first two, we modified a public-domain dictionary look-up tool for segmentation and to accommodate the heuristics required for improved text-to-phone conversion accuracy. Preliminary tests show that the conversion result contains the correct phone sequence over 97% of the time, and the prototype correctly understands the input speech 91.5% of the time