How do speech-recognition software programs understand speech?
Speech-recognition software programs are based on statistical probability. The software analyzes an incoming stream of sounds and interprets those sounds as commands and dictation. This process of interpretation is called speech recognition, and its success is measured by the percentage of correct interpretations or recognition accuracy. The software relies on three sources of information to achieve high recognition accuracy: • Acoustic model — a mathematical model of the sound patterns used by the speaker’s language. • Vocabulary — a list of words the program can recognize. Each word in the vocabulary has a text representation and pronunciation. • Language model — statistical information associated with a vocabulary that describes the likelihood of words and sequences of words occurring in the user’s speech. When you create and train a user profile, you start with a standard set of models and then customize them for the way you speak (acoustic model) and the way you use words (vocabul
