Speech synthesis and voice recognition using small computers

Voice recognition involves the design of electronic systems capable of accepting spoken words and derive meanings from these words. The study of speech synthesis involves not one, but a multitude of disciplines. Sometimes called Speech Science, the field includes acoustics, linguistics, engineering, physiology, phonetic, statistics, communication theory, prosaics, forensics and semantics. Recently, a great deal of interests has been generated in the understanding of human voice as well as speech synthesis by the use of computers in the development of artificial intelligence. In this thesis, advances and techniques of speech synthesis and voice recognition are described. Relative performance, advantages and disadvantages of incorporating these techniques in the design of speech generation and recognition systems are analyzed. A voice recognition system was designed based on the Vic-20 microcomputer. Hardware and software design are described in detailed and experimental results are presented. These results indicated that although considerable advances have been made in the area of voice recognition, much research remains to be done so that a system can be built to recognize a large vocabulary spoken by many individuals at relatively high recognition accuracy.