Embedded Julius: Continuous Speech Recognition Software for Microprocessor

To expand CSR (continuous speech recognition) software to the mobile environmental use, we have developed embedded version of "Julius". Julius is open source CSR software, and has been used by many researchers and developers in Japan as a standard decoder on PCs. Julius works as a real time decoder on a PC. However further computational reduction is necessary to use Julius on a microprocessor. Further cost reduction is needed. For reducing cost of calculating pdfs (probability density function), Julius adopts a GMS (Gaussian mixture selection) method. In this paper, we modify the GMS method to realize a continuous speech recognizer on microprocessors. This approach does not change the structure of acoustic models in consistency with that used by conventional Julius, and enables developers to use acoustic models developed by popular modeling tools. On simulation, the proposed method has archived 20% reduction of computational costs compared to conventional GMS, 40% reduction compared to no GMS. Finally, the embedded version of Julius was tested on a developmental hardware platform named "T-engine". The proposed method showed 2.23 of RTF (real time factor) resulting 79% of that of no GMS without any degradation of recognition performance