application (Or voice recognition) The identification of
spoken words by a machine. The spoken words are digitised
(turned into sequence of numbers) and matched against coded
dictionaries in order to identify the words.
Most systems must be "trained," requiring samples of all the
actual words that will be spoken by the user of the system.
The sample words are digitised, stored in the computer and
used to match against future words. More sophisticated
systems require voice samples, but not of every word. The
system uses the voice samples in conjunction with dictionaries
of larger vocabularies to match the incoming words. Yet other
systems aim to be "speaker-independent", i.e. they will
recognise words in their vocabulary from any speaker without
training.
Another variation is the degree with which systems can cope
with connected speech. People tend to run words together,
e.g. "next week" becomes "neksweek" (the "t" is dropped). For
a voice recognition system to identify words in connected
speech it must take into account the way words are modified by
the preceding and following words.
It has been said (in 1994) that computers will need to be
something like 1000 times faster before large vocabulary (a
few thousand words), speaker-independent, connected speech
voice recognition will be feasible.
(1995-05-05)