Comparing Open Source ASR Toolkits on Italian Children Speech

In this paper, we consider two different aspects of the automatic speech recognition task: the effectiveness of using open-source ASR toolkits and the quite problematic recognition of children speech. On this difficult task, we compare three well established and widely available ASR toolkits and we finally demonstrate the feasibility of applying these results to speech recognition and spoken dialogue system design. Even if various open source ASR toolkits are now available, we were mainly interested in evaluate the usability of the relatively new BAVIECA system in comparison to two systems (SONIC and SPHINX) for which we had already various results in past experiments on children speech. This paper is intended to provide the reader with a simple overview of the solutions adopted by the three different systems under investigation and with the demonstration of their effectiveness on children speech. Furthermore, the paper provides suggestions for future research directions in the field.