Compact Speech Recognition Algorithm Based on Vowel Identification and Its Evaluation on a DSP Board

Abstract

This paper describes a low-cost speech recognition system for controlling terminals and systems. The speech recognition system uses a compact speech recognition algorithm that is based on symbol matching for the five Japanese vowel sounds and a few consonant categories instead of conventional speech parameters. The algorithm has a significant advantage over conventional speaker-independent speech recognition algorithms that use complicated matching techniques; it reduces the memory required (by a factor from 4 to 200) for storing the reference templates and instruction sets and so can be implemented on low-cost processors. We implement this recognition algorithm on a fixed-point, 20-MIPS digital signal processor board with 10-k x 16-bit on-chip memory. Recognition experiments using 10 (20) Japanese city names indicate an accuracy of 96.2% (90.3%). By restricting the target vocabulary 20 words, the proposed speech recognition system can be integrated into many devices at Very low cost.