Limited vocabulary ASR in Hungary

In 1987, at the suggestion of György Takács (who visited the Swedish KTH laboratory in 1986), the research staff of the Department of Telecommunications and Telematics at Budapest University of Technology (BME) began researching automatic speech recognition by computers. The goal was to implement an isolated word-based, person-dependent speech recognizer on an ordinary IBM PC. The research was supported by the government. The fantasy name of the system was VERBIDENT SD 2 (SD = Speaker Dependent). An essential feature of its design was that it was not a stand-alone device, but it run on IBM PC (XT or AT) personal computer suplied with a digital signal processing card. A dictionary editing program was also developed, which allowed the user to edit a dictionary and store it on a magnetic disk. It could be used by more than one person, but each user had to create a speech dictionary with their own voice. The results of the research were reported in the 3rd issue of Híradástechnika periodical in Hungarian in 1988. Thanks to these research results, György Takács was invited to KTH in Sweden for a one year period stipendium in 1989, where he continued his speech recognition research and also created a speech recognizer for Swedish.