Psycho-acoustics inspired automatic speech recognition

Understanding the human spoken language recognition process is still a far scientific goal. Nowadays, commercial automatic speech recognisers (ASRs) achieve high performance at recognising clean speech, but their approaches are poorly related to human speech recognition. They commonly process the phonetic structure of speech while neglecting supra-segmental and syllabic tracts integral to human speech recognition. As a result, these ASRs achieve low performance on spontaneous speech and require enormous costs to build up phonetic and pronunciation models and catch the large variability of human speech. This paper presents a novel ASR that addresses these issues and questions conventional ASR approaches. It uses alternative acoustic models and an exhaustive decoding algorithm to process speech at a syllabic temporal scale (100-250 ms) through a multi-temporal approach inspired by psycho-acoustic studies. Performance comparison on the recognition of spoken Italian numbers (from 0 to 1 million) demonstrates that our approach is cost-effective, outperforms standard phonetic models, and reaches state-of-the-art performance.