Speech recognition language model

Question

I would like to integrate speech recognition into my Android application.

I am aware google provides two language models (free form for dictation and web search for short phrases).

However, my app will have a finite number of possible words (maybe a few thousand). Is it possible to specify the vocabularly; limiting it to these words, in the hope of achieving more accurate results?

My immediate thoughts would be to use the web search language model and then check the results of this against my vocabulary.

Any thoughts appreciated.

Answer 1

I think your intuition is correct and you've answered your own question.

The built in speech recognition provided by google only supports the dictation and search language models. See http://developer.android.com/reference/android/speech/RecognizerIntent.html

You can get back results using these recognizer models and then classify or filter the results to find what best matches your limited vocabulary. There are different techniques to do this and they can range from simple parsing to complex statistical models.

The only other alternative I've seen is to use some other speech recognition on a server that can accept your dedicated language model. Though this is costly and complex and used by commercial speech companies like VLingo or Dragon or Microsoft's Bing.