Providing a crucial source of information on the principles of ASR systems, this detailed and timely volume examines both the theory and implementation issues behind multi-speaker continuous speech recognition. Focusing on the algorithms employed in commercial and laboratory systems, this treatment enables readers to devise practical solutions for ASR system problems.

It also presents a complete overview of C++ programming techniques used to develop ASR applications, thus offering skills that will prove extremely useful in any large C++ based software project. Possible extensions of the well-established ASR technology are highlighted, based on 'Hidden Markov Models' applied to fields such as modelling and prediction of econometric series.

• Accompanying CD-ROM includes the entire C++ source code (Linux, MS-Windows) of a laboratory speech recognition system
• Includes detailed theoretical, mathematical and technical explanations of ASR
• Presents a practical account of the functioning of ASR

Contents:

• Statistical Speech Recognition
• Speech Database
• Speech Signal Analysis
• HMMs and Initialization
• HMM Training
• Language Models
• Recognition
• Evaluation and Parameter Setting
• Econometric Appendix: The Behaviour of Financial Time Series