> I think you are misinterpreting the term "limited vocabulary," which
> has a fairly specific meaning into speech-recognition field. Any
> speech recognition system recognizes a vocabulary that is "limited" in
> the sense of being finite. A limited-vocabulary system recognizes only
> a few thousand words -- perhaps 30,000 at most, and the larger the
> vocabulary, the poorer the performance. The practical limit for
> speaker-independent recognition, without substantial user training,
> and under somewhat adverse conditions, is much lower than that.

Jonathan,

It sounds like my ideal device needs to be highly constrained as far
as the speech recoginition goes. Thinking out loud, suppose I told it
I mostly read science and science-fiction and this reduced the
books-in-print
universe to say 20,000 items (an item being a title and author, with of
course more
unique titles than authors). Could a speech recognition system learn a
universe of
words of that size, so that it could recognize my pronunciation,
by hearing another computer program pronounce them all?

I am just trying to imagine the best way to train this system, if that is
possible
at all, with minimal input from the user. How would you do it?

regards,
alan