Introduction to Speech Recognition
Chapter 1: The Foundations of Speech Recognition
What is Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)?
A Brief History of ASR Systems
The Components of a Speech Recognition Pipeline
Types of Speech Recognition: Speaker-Dependent vs. Speaker-Independent
Types of Speech Recognition: Isolated Word vs. Continuous Speech
How Computers Process Sound: Digital Audio Basics
Introduction to Phonemes and the Building Blocks of Speech
Chapter 2: Processing Audio Signals
From Sound Waves to Digital Data: Sampling and Quantization
Understanding Audio Formats (WAV, MP3, FLAC)
Visualizing Speech: Waveforms and Spectrograms
Pre-emphasis and Framing
Windowing Functions Explained
Introduction to Feature Extraction
Creating Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs)
Hands-on Practical: Visualizing and Processing Audio Files
Chapter 3: Acoustic Modeling
What is an Acoustic Model?
Mapping Sounds to Phonemes
Early Approaches: Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs)
Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) for Sequential Data
Combining GMMs and HMMs
Introduction to Neural Network-based Acoustic Models
The Role of an Acoustic Model in an ASR System
Chapter 4: Language Modeling
What is a Language Model?
The Problem of Ambiguity in Speech
N-gram Language Models: Bigrams and Trigrams
Calculating Probabilities of Word Sequences
The Concept of Perplexity
How Language Models Improve Accuracy
Introduction to Neural Network Language Models
Chapter 5: Decoding and Putting It All Together
The Role of the Decoder
Finding the Most Likely Sequence of Words
Introduction to Search Algorithms
Understanding the Viterbi Algorithm
The Complete ASR Pipeline: A Review
Evaluating Performance: Word Error Rate (WER)
Common Challenges in Speech Recognition
Chapter 6: Building Your First Speech Recognition Application
Introduction to Speech Recognition APIs and Libraries
Setting Up Your Python Environment
Using a Pre-trained Model for Transcription
Transcribing Audio from a File
Capturing and Transcribing Microphone Input in Real-Time
Handling API Responses and Errors
Practice: Build a Simple Voice Command Tool
Introduction to Neural Network Language Models
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- Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition, Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, 2025 (Stanford University (Online Draft)) - A comprehensive textbook that covers traditional N-gram models, neural language models, word embeddings, and sequence models like RNNs and Transformers.
- A Neural Probabilistic Language Model, Yoshua Bengio, Réjean Ducharme, Pascal Vincent, and Christian Jauvin, 2003 Journal of Machine Learning Research, Vol. 3 - A foundational paper that introduces one of the earliest models for learning word embeddings and a neural network-based language model.
- Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space, Tomas Mikolov, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado, and Jeffrey Dean, 2013 arXiv preprint arXiv:1301.3781 DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1301.3781 - Introduces the Word2Vec models (Skip-gram and CBOW) for creating high-quality word embeddings efficiently.
- Attention Is All You Need, Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin, 2017 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30 (Curran Associates, Inc.) - Introduces the Transformer architecture, which revolutionized sequence modeling and became the basis for modern large language models.
- CS224N: Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning, Christopher Manning and Abigail See, 2023 (Stanford University) - An advanced university course providing lecture videos and notes covering word embeddings, recurrent neural networks, and modern transformer models.