Techniques for robust speech recognition in the car environment

The use of voice commands or navigation features in the car is becoming a necessity. As keyboard and display interfaces cannot be used safely while driving, much effort has been done to make automatic speech recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech synthesis (TTS) ubiquitous features in the car. From voice dialing to car navigation, the requirements for voice technology vary greatly. While the use of a hands-free microphone and noise robust algorithms is a must, a wide range of technology spanning from small vocabulary isolated word/continuous speech to phonetic-based flexible vocabulary ASR has to be developed. Except for voice dialing, speaker-independent technology eventually combined with fast adaptation is mandatory. In this paper, we present our efforts in these directions. After focusing on two novel techniques for robust speech recognition in the car, we focus on fast speaker adaptation and report on experiments for a small set of 10 keywords, continuous digit/letter recognition along with phonetic-based recognition for 1800 words.