Nuance Communications, Inc.
Collaborative Transcription With Bidirectional Automatic Speech Recognition

Abstract:

A method of performing bidirectional automatic speech recognition (ASR) using an external information source includes performing a precompute pass by pre-processing an utterance in a backward direction to generate pre-processing data stored in a data structure. In a run-time pass, ASR is performed on the utterance in a forward direction using the pre-processing data to generate a prediction list that has a given number of words in path probability order. A word prediction based on the prediction list is presented to an external information source to obtain a response confirming, selecting or correcting the word prediction. The word prediction based on the response and the prediction list are updated. Processing repeats until the end of the utterance is reached. The method outputs an automatic speech recognized form of the utterance based on the word prediction. Use of the external information source in an integrated manner improves current and future predictions.