ABSTRACT
The analytical (mathematical) background, scientific (linguistic) perspective, and the computational aspect of the speech process that have been covered in the previous three parts (11 chapters) of this book have culminated in this final Part IV: Applications in speech technology. Due to space limitation, it is not possible to cover all areas of speech technology. In the final part of this book, we intend to cover only three selected areas of speech technology — speech recognition, speech enhancement, and speech synthesis — which best illustrate the applications of the dynamic modeling and optimization principles that have formed the basis for describing the speech process in the earlier chapters. Part IV starts with automatic speech recognition (ASR), also called machine speech recognition or speech to text, in this chapter. ASR is the most important area of speech technology, and it encompasses the widest range of concepts, principles, and theories about the speech process to which we have devoted all the previous chapters on its analytical, scientific, and computational backgrounds.
