Application of Amharic Speech Recognition System to Command and Control Computer: An Experiment with Microsoft Word

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2003-07

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Addis Ababa University

Abstract

This stud y explored the possibility of developing Amharic speech input interface to command and control Microsoft Word . Toward s this end, literature were reviewed on speech recogn ition, application of speech recognition, HMM and its application in speech rec ignition , Amharic speech recognition, HTK and human-computer interaction. Speech input interface require s speech recognition system. To develop and te st the required Amharic speech recognition system speech data were recorded from 26 people (10 female and 16 male) in the age range of 20 to 35 . 76 .9% of the recorded data were used to train the recognizer and the remaining data were us ed for testing the performance of recognizer. Two (fixed variance and variable variance based models) HMM-based , speak er independent, small vocab unary, isolated Amharic word recognizer were enveloped . The perform acne of these recognizer was tested using the test data. Although both of them recognized all the test data correctly, the performance of recognizer with variable variance performed better than the recognizer with fix ed variance in live environment. Thus, the recognizer with variable variance was further consid ered for the development of the prototype Amharic speech input interface system. Speech input interface requires communication interface that sends the recognized command word to the application, Microsoft Word in this case . In this stud y the communication interface was written using Visual Basic 6. To test the perform an e of the system as a whole, 18 randomly selected command words were given to 6 people (3 command words for each) and these people were asked to command Microsoft Word orally. The system performed 16 commands accurately and only two command words were wrongly recognized and thus Microsoft Word performed wrong actions. Fin all y, the prototype speech input int interface m d eve loped in this experiment was integrated with Microsoft Word as a Macro for regular use. The result of the experiment showed the feasibility of developing Amharic speech input interface. Based on the res ult of the study and what ha s been learn ed in the course of the re search recommend at ions for further study were forwarded.

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Information Science

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