Patent ID: 7398208

Claim:
A method for producing reference segments describing speech modules, for a voice recognition system, comprising: phonetically segmenting a spoken training voice signal into speech modules in accordance with a predefined transcription; subdividing each speech module into a sequence of time windows; analyzing the spoken training voice signal in each time window to obtain a characteristic vector for each time window and obtain a training model from a sequence of characteristic vectors corresponding to the sequence of time windows, each speech module having a plurality of training models corresponding to a plurality of different pronunciations for the speech module; forming an average time structure for each speech module, the average time structure being formed by comparing the plurality of training modules for the speech module, the average time structure containing information regarding an average pronunciation speed and style, the average time structure having a plurality of time windows, the average time structure being formed by mapping the characteristic vectors of the different training models onto the time windows of the average time structure such that each time window of the average time structure contains a plurality of characteristic vectors, the characteristic vectors being mapped using a non-linear mapping; and saving the plurality of time windows for the average time structure as a reference segment.