Patent ID: 7337116

Claim:
An apparatus for generating a sequence of sub-word units representative of a new word to be added to a dictionary of a speech recognition system, the apparatus comprising: receiving means for receiving signals representative of first and second spoken renditions of the new word; speech recognition means for comparing the received first and second spoken renditions with pre-stored sub-word unit models to generate first and second sequences of sub-word units representative of said first and second spoken renditions of the new word respectively; means for aligning sub-word units of the first sequence with sub-word units of the second sequence to form a number of aligned pairs of sub-word units; first comparing means for comparing, for each aligned pair, the first sequence sub-word unit in the aligned pair with each of a plurality of sub-word units taken from a set of predetermined sub-word units, to generate a corresponding plurality of comparison scores representative of the similarities between the first sequence sub-word unit and the respective sub-word units of the set; second comparing means for comparing, for each aligned pair, the second sequence sub-word unit in the aligned pair with each of said plurality of sub-word units from the set, to generate a further corresponding plurality of comparison scores representative of the similarities between said second sequence sub-word unit and the respective sub-word units of the set; and means for determining, for each aligned pair of sub-word units, a sub-word unit representative of the sub-word units in the aligned pair in dependence upon the comparison scores generated by said first and second comparing means for the aligned pair, to determine a sequence of sub-word units representative of the spoken renditions of the new word.