Unified speech recognition for the landline and wireless environments

Compared to the landline network environment, the wireless environment presents new factors affecting ASR performance (or accuracy). Our goal here is to determine these factors, and their relative importance, and then to devise methods to mitigate them. We approach this goal, first, by conducting a set of experiments where we use a state of the art ASR system trained on landline speech data, and then compare its performance in landline network conditions to its performance across a variety of wireless network conditions. Based on the results of these experiments, we determine critical factors affecting ASR accuracy. We then use multi-condition acoustic models to mitigate these factors and show that the resulting ASR system is able to not only achieve high accuracy across the various wireless network conditions, but also maintain its high accuracy across landline network conditions. This leads to a recognition system that is channel independent which is a very desirable property for telecom based applications.