From Sphinx-II to Whisper — Making Speech Recognition Usable

In this chapter, we first review Sphinx-II, a large-vocabulary speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system developed at Carnegie Mellon University, summarizing the techniques that helped Sphinx-II achieve state-of-the-art recognition performance. We then review Whisper, a system we developed here at Microsoft Corporation, focusing on recognition accuracy, efficiency and usability issues. These three issues are critical to the success of commercial speech applications. Whisper has significantly improved its performance in these three areas. It can be configured as a spoken language front-end (telephony or desktop) or dictation application.

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