A speech recognition system for the Italian language

A real-time speech recognition system for Italian, based on a probabilistic approach, has been developed at the IBM Rome Research Center. It handles natural language sentences, from a 3000-word dictionary, dictated with words separated by short pauses. The architecture consists of an IBM 3090 mainframe and a PC/AT equipped with signal processing hardware. Recognition experiments have been performed for several speakers, each of whom had previously trained the system by dictating a 15-minute text. The paper describes the system, gives results and outlines future developments.