Development of Small Vocabulary Continuous Speech-to-Text System for Kannada Language/Dialects

Abstract

Objectives: To develop a speech-to-text (STT) system using Kaldi speech recognition toolkit for continuous Kannada language/dialects. Methods: A continuous Kannada speech data is collected from 100 speakers/farmers of Karnataka state in field. The lexicon/dictionary and set of phonemes for Kannada language/dialects are created and transcribed the collected speech data using transcriber tool. The ASR models are developed at different phoneme levels using Kaldi. Findings: In this work, an effort is made to develop a robust small vocabulary STT system for continuous Kannada language using Kaldi. The various acoustic modelling techniques are used to develop a robust ASR model and achieved a word error rate (WER) of 0.23%. The performance of the developed ASR model is compared with existing works and analyzed by offline speech recognition. Novelty: Many STT systems have been developed for Indian and International languages/dialects, but not for Kannada language. This work is first of its kind using Kaldi in Kannada language under the constraints of limited data. The developed ASR model could be used further in the development of end-to-end ASR system for speech processing applications. Keywords: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR); Word Error Rate (WER); Continuous Kannada Speech Data; Kannada Language/Dialects; Lexicon