Recent Developments in the Russian Speech Recognition Technology

In this paper, we present a review of the latest developments in the Russian speech recognition research. Although the underlying speech technology is mostly language independent, differences between languages with respect to their structure and grammar have substantial effect on the recognition systems performance. Russian language has a complicated word formation system which is characterized by high degree of inflection and unrigidness of the word order. This greatly reduces the predictive power of the conventional language models and consequently increases the error rate. Current statistical approach to speech recognition systems development requires large amount of both speech and text data. There exist several databases of Russian speech and their descriptions are given in the paper. In addition, we analyze and compare several speech recognition systems developed in Russia and Czech Republic and identify the most promising directions for further research in Russian speech technology.