Accoustic modeling for development of accented indian english ASR

Abstract

This paper investigates Indian English from the point of view of a speech recognition problem. A novel approach towards building an Automated Speech Recognition System (ASR) for Indian English using PocketSphinx has been proposed. The system was trained with a database of English words spoken by Indians in three different accents using continuous as well as semi-continuous models. We have compared the performances in each case and the optimum case performance comes close to 98 % accurate. Based on this study, we tweaked the original PocketSphinx Android application in order to incorporate our results and present it as an Indian English-based SMS sending application. We are working further on this approach to identify ways of successfully training a speech recognition system to recognize a much wider variety of Indian accents with much more significant accuracy.