Patent ID: 7219057

Claim:
A method for improving speech recognition rate, comprising: receiving signals at a back end stage which are sent from a front end stage, which signals are derived from a string of the indices (q-string) selected from entries in a codebook corresponding to recognition feature vectors (f) extracted framewise from speech to be recognized (STBR), and which signals include an indication of the number of bits (B) per codebook index or associated codebook size (Sz), the number of bits being chosen on a dialogue-by-dialogue basis between the front end stage and the back end stage as a function of a tradeoff between a bitrate for the signals and an expected recognition rate; obtaining the string of indices (q-string) from the received signals; obtaining the corresponding recognition feature vectors (f) from the string of indices (q-string) using a codebook having the associated size (Sz); and using the recognition feature vectors (f) to recognize at least one utterance in a word-level recognition process (HMM) to provide word-level recognition at an improved recognition rate.