Toward Speaker Independent Voice Recognition

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which off-the-shelf voice recognition equipment can perform as a speaker-independent system. By “speaker independence” is meant the ability of the system to be used by a larger number of individuals than that which trained the system (but including those who trained it), and by individuals different from those who trained it.

Several independent groups of five subjects trained a threshold T600 voice recognition unit, each subject training the same 50 utterances for a total of 250 utterances. Later, a number of testing trials were conducted wherein subjects tested the system using 1) the 50 utterances that they trained, 2) the utterances that they trained plus the utterances trained by the other four subjects, and 3) the utterances trained only by the other four subjects. Measures of recognition accuracy were percent nonrecognitions and percent misrecognitions.

Results will be discussed in light of additional applications for voice recognition if currently available systems prove to be able to function well in a speaker independent mode.