Question

So, like many others I decided to create my own speech-recognition engine. As it turned out, it’s not easy at all, instead, it’s rather difficult to accomplish for English language particularly, because there is, I’d say, dramatical difference between the way a word is written, and the way it’s pronounced. Being from Georgia, I decided to write speech-recognition for Georgian language. In Georgian, you pronounce words EXACTLY the way you write them. It’s just like a transcription. Will this fact significantly ease my task? Or there are even more difficult… difficulties 😀 ?

Answer 1

Speech recognition is a complex domain with many specific algorithms, tools and methods. To create your own engine you could start with CMUSphinx open source speech recognition toolkit which will allow you to:

• Collect and process data required to support Georgian language
• Create the models for Georgian
• Implement a speech recognition engine in Georgian.
• Use engine to create a speech recognition application running on desktop, on server or on IPhone (through OpenEars)

CMUSphinx already supports English, German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Russian, Mandarin, Icelandic, Italian and many other languages. It’s very simple to add a new one. For new people it usually takes a month or two of concentrated work to implement the required process.

To get started visit the homepage:

http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net

and read the tutorial

http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/wiki/tutorial

If you have any question, please ask them on forums or here!

And, it’s a very common misconception that you just spell the sounds when you speak Georgian. It’s not true for most of the languages in the world. To test the hypothesis try to record some audio in an audio editor and check which sounds are actually pronounced. You’ll be surprised. Tutorial above covers this question in details.