Speech recognition employing a set of markov models that includes markov models representing transitions to and from silence

Abstract From the Canadian patent

The present invention relates to apparatus and method for constructing word baseforms which can be matched against a string of generated acoustic labels which includes: forming a set of phonetic phone machines wherein each phone machine has (i) a plurality of states, (ii) a plurality of transitions each of which extends from a state to a state, (iii) a stored probability for each transition, and (iv) stored label output probabilities, each label output probability corresponding to the probability of said each phone machine producing a corresponding label; wherein said set of phonetic machines is formed to include a subset of onset phone machines, the stored probabilities of each onset phone …