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
The Role of the Decoder
Was this section helpful?
- Speech and Language Processing, Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, 2025 (Pearson) - A standard textbook that provides thorough explanations of speech recognition fundamentals, including the overall architecture, acoustic and language models, and various decoding algorithms.
- Spoken Language Processing: A Guide to Theory, Algorithm, and System Development, Xuedong Huang, Alex Acero, and Hsiao-Wuen Hon, 2001 (Prentice Hall) - A classic textbook offering a broad understanding of statistical speech recognition, with dedicated sections that detail decoding strategies and the underlying theoretical aspects.
- CS224S: Spoken Language Processing, Andrew Maas, Tolúláòpáº¹Ì Ogunremi, 2025 (Stanford University) - Official course materials from a well-regarded university course that provides lectures and practical insights into spoken language processing, covering the ASR pipeline and the function of the decoder.