Patent ID: 7996209

Claim:
A method of generating and detecting confusing phones/syllables, comprising: providing a generating stage, the generating stage comprising: (a) inputting a Mandarin utterance; (b) partitioning the Mandarin utterance into a plurality of segmented phones/syllables and generating the most likely route in a confusing-phone/syllable-embedded recognition net via Forced Alignment of Viterbi decoding; (c) comparing the segmented phones/syllables with a Mandarin acoustic model, wherein the Mandarin acoustic model comprises a plurality of statistical models of Mandarin syllables; (d) determining whether a confusing phone/syllable exists; (e) adding the confusing phone/syllable to the confusing-phone/syllable-embedded recognition net and repeating steps (b), (c), and (d) when the confusing phone/syllable exists; and (f) stopping and outputting all previously generated confusing phones/syllables to a confusing phone/syllable file when a confusing phone/syllable does not exist; providing a detecting stage, the detecting stage comprising: (g) inputting a spoken sentence from a user; (h) aligning the spoken sentence with the confusing-phone/syllable-embedded recognition net, wherein the confusing-phone/syllable-embedded recognition net is built with the confusing phone/syllable file from the generating stage; (i) determining the most likely route of the spoken sentence; and (j) comparing the most likely route of the spoken sentence with the target route of the spoken sentence to acquire pronunciation suggestions/comments about the spoken sentence.