ASR in mobile phones - an industrial approach

In order to make hidden Markov model (HMM) speech recognition suitable for mobile phone applications, Siemens developed a recognizer, Very Smart Recognizer (VSR), for deployment in future mobile phone generations. Typical applications will be name dialling, command and control operations suited for different environments, for example in cars. The paper describes research and development issues of a speech recognizer in mobile devices focusing on noise robustness, memory efficiency and integer implementation. The VSR is shown to reach a word error rate as low as 4.1% on continuous digits recorded in a car environment. Furthermore by means of discriminative training and HMM-parameter coding, the memory requirements of the VSR HMMs are smaller than 64 kBytes.