Discrete utterance speech recognition without time alignment

Computer speech recognition is a discipline that has been viewed from two diametrically opposed perspectives. One perspective perceives recognition as a purely mathematical process; the other perceives it as an extensive linguistical "knowledge" base. Because each perspective has its own set of limitations, neither approach has been able to achieve a viable machine realization of human auditory capabilities. Mathematical approaches do not perform fine phonetic distinctions well; linguistical approaches are not suitably machine oriented. We, therefore, propose in this paper a hybrid approach, suited both for machine implementation and for perceiving subtle differences in phonetic structure.