Abstract

Speech recognition is the analysis side of the subject of machine speech processing. The synthesis side might be called speech production. These two taken together allow computers to work with spoken language. My study concentrates on isolated word speech recognition. Speech recognition, in humans, is thousands of years old. On our planet it could be traced backed millions of years to the dinosaurs. Our topic might better be called automatic speech recognition (ASR). I give a brief survey of ASR, starting with modern phonetics, and continuing through the current state of Large-Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR). A simple computer experiment, using MatLab, into isolated word speech recognition is described in some detail. I experimented with several different recognition algorithms and I used training and testing data from two distinct vocabularies. My training and testing data was collected and recorded with both male and female voices.