Grapheme based speech recognition for large vocabularies

Common speech recognition systems use phonetically motivated subword units. To utilize words in these systems, one has to translate the available graphemic word representation into a phonetic one. To reduce this manual effort we propose to build grapheme based recognition systems. They can be used as speech interfaces for devices that can provide a graphemic representation of words like city names of navigation systems. Results of experiments on a 10,000 word lexicon of German cities are presented.