Automatic Speech Recognition using limited vocabulary: A survey

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is an active field of research due to its huge number of applications and the proliferation of interfaces or computing devices that can support speech processing. But the bulk of applications is based on well-resourced languages that overshadow under-resourced ones. Yet ASR represents an undeniable mean to promote such languages, especially when design human-to-human or human-to-machine systems involving illiterate people. An approach to design an ASR system targeting under-resourced languages is to start with a limited vocabulary. ASR using a limited vocabulary is a subset of the speech recognition problem that focuses on the recognition of a small number of words or sentences. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive view of mechanisms behind ASR systems as well as techniques, tools, projects, recent contributions, and possibly future directions in ASR using a limited vocabulary. This work consequently provides a way to go when designing ASR system using limited vocabulary. Although an emphasis is put on limited vocabulary, most of the tools and techniques reported in this survey applied to ASR systems in general.