A Rapid Match Algorithm for Continuous Speech Recognition

This paper describes an algorithm for performing rapid match on continuous speech that makes it possible to recognize sentences from an 842 word vocabulary on a desktop 33 megahertz 80486 computer in near real time. This algorithm relies on a combination of smoothing and linear segmentation together with the notion of word start groups. It appears that the total computation required grows more slowly than linearly with the vocabulary size, so that larger vocabularies appear feasible, with only moderately enhanced hardware. The rapid match algorithm described here is closely related to the one that is used in DragonDictate, Dragon's commercial 30,000 word discrete utterance recognizer.