The Development of a Speech Recognition Method Robust to Channel Distortions and Noisy Environments for an Audio Response System(ARS)

This paper proposes the methods for improving the recognition rate of theARS, especially equipped with the speech recognition capability. Telephone speech, which is the input to the ARS, is usually affected by the announcements from the system, channel noise, and channel distortion, thus directly applying the recognition algorithm developed for clean speech to the noisy telephone speech will bring the significant performance degradation. To cope with this problem, this paper proposes three methods: 1)the accurate detection of the inputting instant of the speech in order to immediately turn off the announcements from the system at that instant, 2)the effective end-point detection of the noisy telephone speech on the basis of Teager energy, and 3)the SDCN-based compensation of the channel distortion. Experiments on speaker-independent, noisy telephone speech reveal that the combination of the above three proposed methods provides great improvements on the recognition rate over the conventional method, showing about 77% in contrast to only 23%.