Last reviewed: 12/15/2024 8:26:47 AM

In this article
Introduction

Lexicon Management with LexiconKit

No matter how you slice it, a tomato is just a tomato. However, your end users—customers and clients—may be partial to their kind of tomato. Your applications need to accommodate and adjust to their manner of speaking when recognizing and synthesizing.

A lexicon is a collection of word pronunciations that a speech recognition engine (i.e., recognizer) uses to improve recognition accuracy and a speech synthesis engine (i.e., synthesizer) uses to enhance the quality of its pronunciation.

Lexicons play an important role in the accuracy of speech recognition. A speech recognition engine (i.e., recognizer) uses lexicons in the process of recognizing speech. Lexicons consist of the words that a recognizer understands and returns as recognized speech. Since it's impractical for a recognizer to maintain every possible word and context in its spoken language, you enhance the accuracy of speech recognition by extending its lexicon.

Lexicons play an important role in the quality of text-to-speech playback. A text-to-speech engine (i.e., synthesizer) uses lexicons to obtain pronunciation information associated with words to generate the appropriate speech sounds for the word. For example, with a lexicon you may ensure "record" is pronounced correctly when used as a noun and when used as a verb.

What is Lexicon Management?

Lexicon management enables you to:

  • tailor pronunciations to specific end user preferences,
  • extend recognizer and synthesizer lexicons to deploy with application, and
  • create, edit, and speak pronunciations as part of your deployed applications.

Application benefits include:

  • improved speech recognition accuracy and
  • enhanced speech synthesis clarity.

What is LexiconKit?

Chant LexiconKit handles the complexities of creating and editing lexicons for deployment with applications and generating and speaking pronunciations.

LexiconKit provides you a simple way to create, edit, and speak word pronunciations in lexicons. Applications can generate and speak pronunciations as part of its runtime operation to enable real-time customization and tailoring of speech recognition and speech synthesis environments.

It simplifies the process of managing word pronunciations for Acapela TTS, Cepstral Swift API, and Microsoft lexicon formats to use with your favorite speech recognizers and synthesizers.

LexiconKit includes C++, C++Builder, Delphi, Java, and .NET Framework class libraries to support all your programming languages and provides sample projects for popular IDEs—such as the latest Visual Studio from Microsoft, RAD Studio from Embarcadero, and Java IDEs Eclipse, IntelliJ, JDeveloper, and NetBeans.

The class libraries can be integrated with 32-bit and 64-bit applications.

For more information about the Lexicon Management with LexiconKit, review the following topics:

Features