Towards speech technology for South African languages: automatic speech recognition in Xhosa

Abstract

This article reports on the first application of ‘state-of-the-art’ automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology to Xhosa, an indigenous South African language. The project, aimed at developing the technology required to implement a spoken-language front-end for an automatic translation system, is part of a collaborative effort in speech technology research for South African languages. The system we propose to perform this task consists of a speaker independent, isolated word, automatic speech recogniser. During system development speech data from 40 native. Xhosa speakers was recorded, annotated and organised into a database. Two systems were evaluated, one using hidden Markov word models and another implemented with hidden Markov phone models. Recognition rates of up to 95% were achieved.