Speech Recognition in Indian Languages—A Survey

Abstract

In this paper, a brief overview derived out of detailed survey of speech recognition works reported in Indian languages is described. Robustness of speech recognition systems toward language variation is the recent trend of research in speech recognition technology. To develop a system which can communicate with human in any language like any other human is the foremost requirement in order to design appropriate speech recognition technology for one to all. India is a country which has vast linguistic variations among its billion plus population. Therefore, it provides a sound area of research toward language-specific speech recognition technology. From the beginning of the commercial availability of the speech recognition system, the technology has been dominated by the hidden Markov model (HMM) methodology due to its capability of modeling temporal structures of speech and encoding them as a sequence of spectral vectors. Most of the work done in Indian languages also uses HMM technology. However, from the last 10–15 years after the acceptance of neurocomputing as an alternative to HMM, artificial neural network (ANN)-based methodologies have started to receive attention for application in speech recognition. This is a trend worldwide as part of which few works have also been reported by a few researchers.