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***** Warning: NON BEER RELATED *****<\/span>This was a Nuance Press release today that I wanted to share with everyone…<\/p>\n <\/span>How Does Voice Recognition Technology Work?<\/span><\/p>\n You might not realize it when you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re on the phone waiting for a computer to figure out if you just said \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Flight Three\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Fight me,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s kind of a miracle that speech technology works at all. Wanting to know how it works, we called Dan Faulkner, director of product management and offer marketing at Burlington, Mass.\u00e2\u20ac\u201cbased Nuance, which has programmed speech recognition software for Amtrak and Sony\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s PlayStation.<\/p>\n First, software has to figure out when you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re talking, and when you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re done. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Speech has certain characteristics, certain harmonic frequencies, and the software waits to identify these,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Faulkner. When a computer identifies speech and then hears a pause, it sends that snippet along to the next stage of the program, which tries to decode it.<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The next stage is all based on phonemes,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Faulkner. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Phonemes are the basic building blocks of speech, the sounds we make to make the words. So a word like \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcthought\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 is broken down into three phonemes, which you might spell as th, aw, and teh.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n The computer looks for the phonemes and then, in trying to decide what word you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve said, compares it to a database of words broken down into phonemes. The comparison, though, isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just a straight search, but a probabalistic statistical model, based on the computer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s idea of what you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re likely to say next. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve just said the, for instance,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Faulkner, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the computer isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t going to look for a verb, because a verb very rarely follows the.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n And if all goes correctly, the voice recognition program will have a fair chance of actually figuring out that you really do want to fly to Mexico City instead of New Mexico. \u00e2\u20ac\u201d B.U.<\/p>\n