Toward a real-time spoken language system using commercial hardware

We describe the methods and hardware that we are using to produce a real-time demonstration of an integrated Spoken Language System. We describe algorithms that greatly reduce the computation needed to compute the N-Best sentence hypotheses. To avoid grammar coverage problems we use a fully-connected first-order statistical class grammar. The speech-search algorithm is implemented on a board with a single Intel i860 chip, which provides a factor of 5 speedup over a SUN 4 for straight C code. The board plugs directly into the VME bus of the SUN4, which controls the system and contains the natural language system and application back end.