Computers and Speech Recognition: Techniques and Applications

Computers and Speech Recognition: Techniques and Applications Abstract Speech is the most natural and common way of communication between people. It would seem only natural that computer development would eventually progress to the point where people would want to extend the human-computer interface to include speech. Once this happened, numerous techniques were explored. The goals of speech recognition became more and more ambitious, and researchers today continue to push the limits of what computers can do with the spoken word. This paper examines the problem of computer speech recognition by looking at the steps involved in getting from a spoken word to the word's recognition by the machine. The difficulties of continuous speech recognition will be enumerated and examined, as will the most popular recognition technique used today. The analysis ends with a brief description of some of the applications of speech recognition. Introduction Simply put, speech recognition is difficult. A computer does not have a useful thing called an ear that enables it to hear sounds, or a brain to process those sounds into recognizable words and phrases. There are three main stages involved in speech recognition: preprocessing, recognition, and communication. Preprocessing involves taking the speech input and converting it into something the computer can use. During the recognition stage, the computer must identify what has been said. Finally, in the communication stage, the computer acts upon the translated input (Markowitz). There are many inherent difficulties involved in speech recognition. For example, human speech can span more than 20,000 frequencies. A computer would quickly become overwhelmed by data if it was supplied with eve... ...e applications where they could be useful. For many people in the past few years, speech recognition has moved from just being a novelty to becoming an important tool used in their everyday lives. References Books 1. Markowitz, Judith A. Using Speech Recognition. Prentice-Hall, Inc, 1996. 2. Keller, Eric. Fundamentals of Speech Synthesis and Speech Recognition. John Wiley & Sons, 1994. 3. Hollingum, Jack and Cassford, Graham. Speech Technology at Work. IFS Publications, Ltd, 1988. WWW Sites 1. http://www.linfield.edu/~dbrewer/speech/spchi.html College student's informative summary paper on speech recognition 2. http://www.speech.usyd.edu.au/comp.speech/FAQ6.html One of many speech recognition questions answered. FOR MORE INFORMATION http://www.speech.usyd.edu.au/comp.speech/SpeechLinks.html A large list of Speech Recognition links on the web.