voicerecog

I found one useful summary of what speech recognition is here. It details the types of speech recognizers, including speaker-independent, speaker-dependent, continuous speech recognition, isolated speech recognition, and vocabulary constrained system. As the technology exists now, it seems that one has to figure out a compromise between vocabulary size that the computer can recognize and flexibility of the system to recognize different speakers and natural ways of speaking. From what Shawn has told me about what we’re looking for, we definitely need a continuous speech program with a rather large vocabulary. Allowing natural ways of speaking seems to be the most important element since we want this system to maintain a conversational feel. So, the accuracy of the recognition doesn’t have to be perfect.