A speech-recognition-based system for converting hebrew text to phonetic representation

Abstract

A system for converting Hebrew text into phonetic text is presented. The system applies speech recognition techniques for identifying vowels in spoken text and inserts these vowels in the original vowelless Hebrew text. The original Hebrew text is presented to the user on his computer terminal. The user then reads the text into a microphone and the system analyzes the input voice and converts each word into a string of Linear Prediction coefficients (LPC) vectors which are then compared to vectors stored in a set of codebooks (one codebook per vowel) to find the best match. The identified vowels and their location are then input to a Dynamic-Time-Warping algorithm which matches the acoustic information with the text in order to correctly position the vowels in each word using Hebrew syntax rules. The system could be used in preparing text for automatic, Hebrew Text-To-Speech ( TTS ) systems and in computer aided linguistic studies.