NDLI: A Hindi speech recognizer for an agricultural video search application

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Medhi, Indrani Sitaram, Sunayana Bali, Kalika Cuendet, Sebastien
Abstract	Voice user interfaces for ICTD applications have immense potential in their ability to reach to a large illiterate or semi-literate population in these regions where text-based interfaces are of little use. However, building speech systems for a new language is a highly resource intensive task. There have been attempts in the past to develop techniques to circumvent the need for large amounts of data and technical expertise required to build such systems. In this paper we present the development and evaluation of an application specific speech recognizer for Hindi. We use the Salaam method [4] to bootstrap a high quality speech engine in English to develop a mobile speech based agricultural video search for farmers in India. With very little training data for a 79 word vocabulary we are able to achieve >90% accuracies for test and field deployments. We report some observations from field that we believe are critical to the effective development and usability of a speech application in ICTD.
Starting Page	1
Ending Page	8
Page Count	8
File Format	PDF
ISBN	9781450318563
DOI	10.1145/2442882.2442889
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	2013-01-11
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Subject Keyword	Less-resource language Speech recognition Hindi Mobile application
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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A Hindi speech recognizer for an agricultural video search application