Patent ID: 6230129
Filing Date: 2001-05-08
Classification: G10L

Abstract:
An apparatus for representing a given speech utterance as a digital word prototype, comprising:a phone model database for storing phone model speech data corresponding to a plurality of phonemes;a phoneme similarity module connected to said phone model database and receptive of said given speech utterance for producing phoneme similarity data indicative of the correlation between the given speech utterance and said phone model speech data with respect to time;a speech normalization module receptive of said phoneme similarity data for normalizing said phoneme similarity data with respect to a non-speech part of the given speech utterance wherein said speech normalization module normalizes said phoneme similarity data by generating an average phoneme similarity value based on the phoneme similarity data in the non-speech part of the given speech utterance and subtracting said average phoneme similarity value from each of the phoneme similarity values associated with said phoneme similarity data; anda word modeling module receptive of said phoneme similarity data and normalized phoneme similarity data for building word model data by segmenting the normalized phoneme similarity data into at least one segment and determining a sum for the normalized phoneme similarity data in each of said segments, thereby electronically representing the given speech utterance using said word model data.