Abstract: An apparatus and method for recognition of sentences comprised of utterances separated by short pauses, the utterances representative of both isolated words and connected words. Speech to be recognized is converted into frames of digital signals. Selected ones of the frames of digital signals are compared with isolated word and connected word templates stored in a template memory. Recognition of isolated words is done by comparing the selected frames of digital signals with the isolated word templates in accordance with a windowed dynamic programming algorithm having path boundary control, while connected word recognition is accomplished by comparing selected frames of digital signals with the connected word templates in accordance with a full DPA having path score normalization and utterance frame penalty calculation capability. Variable frame rate encoding is used to identify the selected frames of digital signals.

Abstract: A continuous speech recognition system includes a plurality of processors doing template comparisons of speech data. Each processor has an associated memory shared with the other processors by direct memory access (DMA) through a shared data bus. The DMA circuitry is distributed between the processors to eliminate redundancy, since if each processor had a full DMA circuit, one of the circuits would be idle when the processors communicated.