MLLR Based Speaker Adaptation for Indian Accents

Abstract

Speech Recognition has become an inherent and important feature of today’s mobile based apps. Speech input is a very popular option for people with limitations of using the keyboard / mouse in a computer system. Nowadays, more voice messages are used than written text as they also convey the emotions of the speakers. As solutions are developed with native speakers of a language, many of the English input systems have higher accuracy for native speakers than for people with English as their second language (L2), especially for Asian population. The complexity increases since the accent and intonation of Indian speakers are varied from region to region and state to state. This paper analyses an effective speaker adaptation mechanism implemented with Indian speaker profiles and with a very small amount of adaptation data. This research is to facilitate a speaker adaptive system for the speech disabled users with limited disabilities like stuttering and/or unintelligible speech due to illness like cerebral palsy. Experimental results show improvements in the recognition accuracy for speakers speaking small sentences.