An automatic word spotting system for conversational speech

Sperry Univac is developing a linguistically oriented system for locating important words in conversational speech. The system uses acoustic, prosodic, and phonetic analyses to produce a phonetic description of the incoming speech. Next, phonetic dictionary representations of the keywords to be found are compared to all portions of the phonetic analysis. High scoring matches are then verified by aligning prestored spectral patterns with the spectral information found during analysis, and resulting good matches are announced as likely keyword occurrences. Current results are presented for this system, which is being developed and tested on bandlimited, conversational speech from a large, diverse speaker population.