• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.24 no.8
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• pp.498-504
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• 2005

We introduce a Korean speech recognition platform (ECHOS) developed for education and research Purposes. ECHOS lowers the entry barrier to speech recognition research and can be used as a reference engine by providing elementary speech recognition modules. It has an easy simple object-oriented architecture, implemented in the C++ language with the standard template library. The input of the ECHOS is digital speech data sampled at 8 or 16 kHz. Its output is the 1-best recognition result. N-best recognition results, and a word graph. The recognition engine is composed of MFCC/PLP feature extraction, HMM-based acoustic modeling, n-gram language modeling, finite state network (FSN)- and lexical tree-based search algorithms. It can handle various tasks from isolated word recognition to large vocabulary continuous speech recognition. We compare the performance of ECHOS and hidden Markov model toolkit (HTK) for validation. In an FSN-based task. ECHOS shows similar word accuracy while the recognition time is doubled because of object-oriented implementation. For a 8000-word continuous speech recognition task, using the lexical tree search algorithm different from the algorithm used in HTK, it increases the word error rate by $40\%$ relatively but reduces the recognition time to half.