Introduction to Speech Recognition
Chapter 1: The Foundations of Speech Recognition
What is Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)?
A Brief History of ASR Systems
The Components of a Speech Recognition Pipeline
Types of Speech Recognition: Speaker-Dependent vs. Speaker-Independent
Types of Speech Recognition: Isolated Word vs. Continuous Speech
How Computers Process Sound: Digital Audio Basics
Introduction to Phonemes and the Building Blocks of Speech
Chapter 2: Processing Audio Signals
From Sound Waves to Digital Data: Sampling and Quantization
Understanding Audio Formats (WAV, MP3, FLAC)
Visualizing Speech: Waveforms and Spectrograms
Pre-emphasis and Framing
Windowing Functions Explained
Introduction to Feature Extraction
Creating Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs)
Hands-on Practical: Visualizing and Processing Audio Files
Chapter 3: Acoustic Modeling
What is an Acoustic Model?
Mapping Sounds to Phonemes
Early Approaches: Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs)
Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) for Sequential Data
Combining GMMs and HMMs
Introduction to Neural Network-based Acoustic Models
The Role of an Acoustic Model in an ASR System
Chapter 4: Language Modeling
What is a Language Model?
The Problem of Ambiguity in Speech
N-gram Language Models: Bigrams and Trigrams
Calculating Probabilities of Word Sequences
The Concept of Perplexity
How Language Models Improve Accuracy
Introduction to Neural Network Language Models
Chapter 5: Decoding and Putting It All Together
The Role of the Decoder
Finding the Most Likely Sequence of Words
Introduction to Search Algorithms
Understanding the Viterbi Algorithm
The Complete ASR Pipeline: A Review
Evaluating Performance: Word Error Rate (WER)
Common Challenges in Speech Recognition
Chapter 6: Building Your First Speech Recognition Application
Introduction to Speech Recognition APIs and Libraries
Setting Up Your Python Environment
Using a Pre-trained Model for Transcription
Transcribing Audio from a File
Capturing and Transcribing Microphone Input in Real-Time
Handling API Responses and Errors
Practice: Build a Simple Voice Command Tool
Hands-on Practical: Visualizing and Processing Audio Files
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- Speech and Language Processing (3rd ed. draft), Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, 2025 - An online draft of a comprehensive textbook covering fundamentals of speech processing, including signal analysis and feature extraction like MFCCs.
- librosa: Audio and music analysis in Python, Brian McFee, Colin Raffel, Dawen Liang, Daniel PW Ellis, Matt McVicar, Eric Battenberg, Oriol Nieto, 2015 Proceedings of the 14th Python in Science Conference DOI: 10.25080/majora-7b9e6e87-00c - Official documentation for the
librosaPython library, providing practical guides and API references for audio analysis and feature extraction. - Digital Signal Processing: Principles, Algorithms, and Applications, John G. Proakis and Dimitris G. Manolakis, 2007 (Pearson Prentice Hall) - A standard textbook providing a theoretical foundation for digital signal processing, important for understanding concepts like sampling, Fourier transforms, and spectral analysis.