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Learning Personalized Pronunciations for Contact Names Recognition

Tony Bruguier
Fuchun Peng
Interspeech 2016 (to appear)

Abstract

Person name is intrinsically difficult to pronounce due to its variety of origin and non-regularity. This poses significant challenges to contact dialing by voice. In order to mitigate the pronunciation problem for contact names, we propose using personalized pronunciation learning: people can use their own pronunciations for their contact names. We achieve this by implicitly learning from users' corrections in real time, providing a seamless user experience improvement. We show that personalized pronunciation significantly reduces word error for difficult contact names by 15% relatively.