Speech recognition training for small hardware devices

A distributed speech processing system for supporting applications that reside on a personal digital assistant (PDA) device, comprising:

• an input means for capturing speech training data at the PDA;
• a speech recognizer coupled to said input means and receptive of speech training data from said input means;
• said speech recognizer being operative to process the speech training data into an intermediate representation of the speech training data and communicate the intermediate representation to a second computing device;
• a speech model server residing on said second computing device, said second computing device being interconnected via a network to the PDA;
• said speech model server receiving the intermediate representation of the speech training data and generating a speech reference model using the intermediate representation, said speech model server further being operative to communicate the speech reference model to said first computing device;
• and
• a lexicon coupled to said speech recognizer for storing the speech reference model on the PDA.

A distributed speech processing system for supporting applications that reside on a cellular telephone handset device, comprising:

• an input means for capturing speech training data at the handset device;
• a speech recognizer coupled to said input means and receptive of speech training data from said input means;
• said speech recognizer being operative to process the speech training data into an intermediate representation of the speech training data and communicate the intermediate representation to a second computing device;
• a speech model server residing on said second computing device, said second computing device being interconnected via a network to the handset device;
• said speech model server receiving the intermediate representation of the speech training data and generating a speech reference model using the intermediate representation, said speech model server further being operative to communicate the speech reference model to said first computing device;
• and
• a lexicon coupled to said speech recognizer for storing the speech reference model on the handset device.

A method of building speech reference models for use in a speech recognition system, comprising the steps of:

• collecting speech training data at a first computing device;
• processing the speech training data into an intermediate representation of the speech training data on said first computing device;
• communicating said intermediate representation of the speech training data to a second computing device, said second computing device interconnected via a network to said first computing device;
• creating a speech reference model from said intermediate representation at said second computing device;
• and
• communicating said speech reference model to the first computing device for use in the speech recognition system.