Microsoft Windows Highly Intelligent Speech Recognizer: Whisper

  • Xuedong Huang ,
  • Alex Acero ,
  • Fil Alleva ,
  • Mei-Yuh Hwang ,
  • Li Jiang ,
  • Milind Mahajan

Proc. of the Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing |

Since January 1993, we have been working to refine and extend Sphinx-I1 technologies in order to develop practical speech recognition at Microsoft. The result of that work has been the Whisper (Windows Highly Intelligent Speech Recognizer). Whisper represents significantly improved recognition efficiency, usability, and accuracy, when compared with the Sphinx-I1 system. In addition Whisper offers speech input capabilities for Microsoft Windows@ and can be scaled to meet different PC platform configurations. It provides features such as continuous speech recognition, speaker-independence, on-line adaptation, noise robustness, dynamic vocabularies and grammars. For typical Windows@ Command-and-Control applications (less than 1,000 words), Whisper provides a software only solution on PCs equipped with a 486DX, 4MB of memory, and a standard sound card and a desk-top microphone.