Spanish Speech Recognition Oriented to a Wheelchair Control

This paper presents a computer application that recognizes Spanish voice command for a speaker independent closed vocabulary. The Spanish language model adopted is the one provided for Microsoft (R) SAPI (Speech Application Program Interface). This language model was limited to recognize only the grammar related with the functionalities that the user of the automated wheelchair studied by the Automatica research group of the Universidad Autonoma de Manizales can handle. The testing for measure the recognition system performance was implemented discriminately by gender and was developed in three environments with noise level ranges differentiated according the current Colombian legislation about maximum permissible ambient noise levels. It is highlighted that the recognition obtained is speaker independent without requiring the extensive previous training that with other tools should be done.