1 LARGE VOCABULARY CONTINUOUS SPEECH RECOGNITION

Large vocabulary speaker-independent speech recognition systems being capable of recognizing continuous speech based on hidden Markov models are today’s standard. This review introduces the fundamentals of speech and the underlying speech recognition problems. The three classical approaches, i.e., the acoustic-phonetic, the statistical (pattern) recognition and the artificial intelligence approach are presented, and the emphasis is put to the most common statistical methods. Finally, the evolution of speech recognizers is illustrated.