speech recognition

speech recognition
voice recognition

   <application> (Or voice recognition) The identification of
   spoken words by a machine.  The spoken words are digitised
   (turned into sequence of numbers) and matched against coded
   dictionaries in order to identify the words.

   Most systems must be "trained," requiring samples of all the
   actual words that will be spoken by the user of the system.
   The sample words are digitised, stored in the computer and
   used to match against future words.  More sophisticated
   systems require voice samples, but not of every word.  The
   system uses the voice samples in conjunction with dictionaries
   of larger vocabularies to match the incoming words.  Yet other
   systems aim to be "speaker-independent", i.e. they will
   recognise words in their vocabulary from any speaker without
   training.

   Another variation is the degree with which systems can cope
   with connected speech.  People tend to run words together,
   e.g. "next week" becomes "neksweek" (the "t" is dropped).  For
   a voice recognition system to identify words in connected
   speech it must take into account the way words are modified by
   the preceding and following words.

   It has been said (in 1994) that computers will need to be
   something like 1000 times faster before large vocabulary (a
   few thousand words), speaker-independent, connected speech
   voice recognition will be feasible.

   (1995-05-05)