Syllable-Based Speech Recognition for Amharic

Amharic is the Semitic language that has the second large number of speakers after Arabic (Hayward and Richard 1999). Its writing system is syllabic with Consonant-Vowel (CV) syllable structure. Amharic orthography has more or less a one to one correspondence with syllabic sounds. We have used this feature of Amharic to develop a CV syllable-based speech recognizer, using Hidden Markov Modeling (HMM), and achieved 90.43% word recognition accuracy.