Speaker Independent 1000 Words Speech Recognition in Spanish

In this paper a speaker-independent speech recognition system for 1006 isolated words in Spanish is presented. The approach used is based on discrete Hidden Markov Models. It is a first effort to develop a system with these characteristics in our Department. The initial task has been to recognize isolated words but the final objective is getting a speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system for large vocabularies (more than 1000 words) in our language. The different phases of building our system, its characteristics and used techniques are described. Speech data base characteristics and the process of collecting it are commented. Finally, some relevant experiments which have been achieved are presented and different future improvements will be commented.