Towards a Localised German Automatic Speech Recognition

Abstract:
Spoken languages are often rich in regional accents and dialects. These local variations often pose challenges to automatic speech recognition. In this study, we analyse the influence of German regional accents on the performance of a large vocabulary continuous speech recogniser trained on standard German data. The experiments show a large variation in the error rate over different regions. We investigate the influence of phoneme-level variations on recognition errors and use our findings to build a dialect recognition system.