Accented Speech Recognition under the Indian context

Accent forms an integral part of identifying cultures, emotions, behavior'ss, etc. People often perceive each other in a different manner due to their accent. The accent itself can be a conveyor of status, pride, and other emotional information which can be captured through Speech itself. Accent itself can be defined as: "the way in which people in a particular area, country, or social group pronounce words" or "a special emphasis given to a syllable in a word, word in a sentence, or note in a set of musical notes". Accented Speech Recognition is one the most important problems in the domain of Speech Recognition. Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary sub-field of Computer Science and Linguistics research where the main aim is to develop technologies which enable conversion of speech into text. The speech can be of any form such as read speech or spontaneous speech, conversational speech. As all instances of language utterances are present speech is very diverse and exhibits many traits of variability. This diversity stems from the environmental conditions, variabilities from speaker to speaker, channel noise, differences in Speech production due to disabilities, presence of disfluencies. Speech therefore is indeed a rich source of information waiting to be exploited.