Dynamic Time Warping based speech recognition for isolated sinhala words

Currently there is a considerable tendency in developing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems which are capable of tracking the human speech done in local specific languages and identifying them because the people prefer to work with computers using their native language. In Sri Lanka, a sizable portion of the population is discouraged to use computers simply because of the language barrier and difficulty of using the conventional interfaces. Consequently there is a great demand for a computer interface which enables the communication in Sinhala. This paper presents an approach to identify Sinhala speech based on Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC). The correct recognition was achieved in several phases and each phase is described in detail.