Automatic language independent triphone training using a phonetic table

A method for training acoustic models for a new target language is provided using a phonetic table, which characterizes the phones, used in one or more reference language(s) with respect to their articulatory properties; a phonetic table, which characterizes the phones used in the target language with respect to their articulatory properties; a set of trained monophones for the reference language(s); and a database of sentences in the target language and its phonetic transcription. With these inputs, the new method completely and automatically takes care of the steps of monophone seeding and triphone clustering and machine intensive training steps involved in triphone acoustic training.