Voice controlled mobile phone for car environment

The development of an application of speech processing in a car environment is addressed. The main objective is to provide the user of a vehicular phone with a powerful and friendly bidirectional vocal interface. In particular, the paper focusses on the speech recogniser component of the interface as it was specifically designed and tuned to operate in the very hostile acoustic environment of a moving car. The recogniser operates in a fully speaker dependent mode so enabling the user to store his/her personal agenda of frequent called parties. For the training, three repetitions of each vocabulary word are recommended, although the performances remain still satisfactory with only two repetitions. Reliable performance assessment was conducted with particular attention to the aspect of robustness of the recogniser against spurious noises. Standard procedures (SAM oriented) were used to guarantee the repeatability of any test. An outlook on future improvements is also given.