Abstract:
This paper presents the development of a Sinhala
Speech Recognition System to be deployed in an Interactive Voice
Response (IVR) system of a telecommunication service provider.
The main objectives are to recognize Sinhala digits and names
of Sinhala songs to be set up as ringback tones. Sinhala being a
phonetic language, its features are studied to develop a list of 47
phonemes. A continuous speech recognition system is developed
based on Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The acoustic model is
trained using the voice through mobile phone. The outcome is a
speaker independent speech recognition system which is capable
of recognizing 10 digits and 50 Sinhala songs. A word error
rate (WER) of 11.2% using a speech corpus of 0.862 hours and
a sentence error rate (SER) of 5.7% using a speech corpus of
1.388 hours are achieved for digits and songs respectively.