Sinhala Speech Recognition for Interactive Voice Response Systems Accessed Through Mobile Phones

• Published in: 2018 Moratuwa Engineering Research Conference (MERCon) pp. 241 - 246
• Main Authors: Manamperi, Wageesha, Karunathilake, Dinesha, Madhushani, Thilini, Galagedara, Nimasha, Dias, Dileeka
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.05.2018
• Subjects: Acoustics; Decoding; Dictionaries; Hidden Markov models; HMM; IVR; Phonetics; sinhala; Speech recognition; Training
• DOI: 10.1109/MERCon.2018.8421888

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.