Patent ID: 7467087

Claim:
A method of training acoustic models for use in phonetically spelled word models comprising: using a training pronunciation guesser to generate a phonetic spelling, each including a sequence of phonemes, from the text spelling of each of a set of acoustic training words; mapping sequences of sound associated with utterances from each of multiple speakers of each of a plurality of the training words against the corresponding sequence of phonemes defined by the phonetic spelling associated with the training word by the pronunciation guesser; and for each of a plurality of said phonemes, using the sounds of the utterances from multiple speakers mapped against a given phoneme in one or more of said phonetic spellings to develop at least one multi-speaker acoustic phoneme model for the given phoneme; further including using the multi-speaker acoustic phoneme models, or acoustic models derived from them, in speech recognition performed against acoustic word models of words, where the acoustic word model of a given word is composed of a sequence of the acoustic phoneme models corresponding to a phonetic spelling generated for the given word by a recognition pronunciation guesser; and wherein the recognition pronunciation guesser is sufficiently similar to the training pronunciation guesser that it would make a majority of the same phonetic spelling errors made by the training pronunciation guesser in the acoustic training words if it were to generate phonetic spellings for the set of acoustic training words.