Smoothed frame labeling associates phonetic frame labels with a given speech frame as a function of (a) the closeness with which the given frame compares to each of a plurality of acoustic models, (b) which frame labels correspond with a neighboring frame, and (c) transition probabilities which indicate, for the frame labels associated with the neighboring frame, which frame labels are probably associated with the given frame. The smoothed frame labeling is used to divide the speech into segments of frames having the same class of labels. The invention represents words as a collection of known diphone models, each of which models the sound before and after a boundary between segments derived by the smoothed frame labeling. At recognition time, the speech is divided into segments by smoothed frame labeling; diphone models are derived for each boundary between the resulting segments; and the resulting diphone models are compared against the known diphone models to determine which of the known diphone models match the segment boundaries in the speech. Then a combined-displaced-evidence method is used to determine which words occur in the speech. This method detects which acoustic patterns, in the form of the known diphone models, match various portions of the speech. In response to each such match, it associates with the speech an evidence score for each vocabulary word in which that pattern is known to occur. It displaces each such score from the location of its associated matched pattern by the known distance between that pattern and the beginning of the score's word. Then all the evidence scores for a word located in a given portion of the speech are combined to produce a score which indicates the probability of that word starting in that portion of the speech. This score is combined with a score produced by comparing a histogram from a portion of the speech against a histogram of each word. The resulting combined score determines whether a given word should undergo a more detailed comparison against the speech to be recognized.
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