What is Soft Computation

Speech is the natural communication means, however, it is not the typical input means afforded by computers. The interaction between humans and machines would have become easier, if speech were an alternative effective input means to the keyboard and mouse. With advancement in techniques for signal processing and model building and the empowerment of computing devices, significant progress has been made in speech recognition research, and various speech based applications have been developed. With rapid advancement of the speech recognition technology, telephone speech technology are getting more involved in many new applications of spoken language processing. From the literature it has been found that the spectro-temporal features gives a significant performance improvement for telephone speech recognition system in comparison to the robust feature techniques used for the recognition purpose. In this chapter, the authors have reported the use of various spectral and temporal features and the soft computing techniques that have been used for the telephonic speech recognition.