Many individuals in contemporary society communicate more effectively via spoken instructions or commands than by any other communication medium. Accordingly, it would be advantageous to have many devices (or equipment) used by contemporary society to be at least partially controllable by voice commands. However, to fully operate many devices (or equipment) known today would require a large vocabulary of recognizable words or commands to be able to effectuate a sufficient level of control over the device (or equipment) being operated.
Some designers of voice recognition equipment have attempted to utilize speaker dependent voice recognition technology to accomplish such controls. As is known, speaker dependent technology utilizes prestored voice templates to recognize the voice of a particular individual to perform specified functions that relate to a predetermined set of recognized words. Speaker dependent technology is often recognized as being inferior to speaker independent technology in that the speaker dependent device must be programmed (trained) to recognize each individual operator. Training is commonly understood to be a process by which an individual repeats a predetermined set of words a sufficient number of times so that an acceptable template is formed. Training is often a time consuming process and the method and manner of storing a sufficiently large number of templates (so as to allow an acceptable number of individuals to operate the same piece of equipment) is often prohibitively large. To compensate for this, other individuals have conceived of many different means for rapidly replacing the template of one individual with the template for another individual so as to "reprogram" the device to recognize the voice commands of a new individual.
Speaker independent technology does not rely on a set of particularized trained voice templates to recognize the voice commands. Instead, the speaker independent device is programmed to recognize the voice commands of several (potentially any) individuals (taking into account the differences in speech patterns, such as inflections, pitch, accents, and other variations in spoken words) so as to reliably identify the particular command being spoken by number of people. However, speaker independent technology requires significantly more sophisticated processing technology and hence contemporary speaker independent devices have been constrained to a limited number of recognizable words.
Known speaker independent devices have concentrated primarily on recognizing the numbers zero through nine, and certain limited commands to effectuate the voice controlled dialing of a telephone or the like. Such technology is insufficient to control many other contemporary devices, such as a two-way radio frequency transceiver, that requires a significantly large number of commands to achieve an acceptable level of operation. This is unfortunate as voice control of a two-way mobile radio would be highly desirable so as to alleviate the need to divert a driver's attention from operating the vehicle to manipulate or adjust one or more control knobs or buttons on the radio. Thus, voice control of mobile radios and the like have been confined to speaker dependent technology with their associated problems of reprogramming (training) so that various members of a police department or other organization can use the same radio. Accordingly, a need exists in the art to provide for voice control of radio (and other devices) without resorting to complicated processing or programming techniques as required in the past.