Tangerine: a large vocabulary Mandarin dictation system

The text input for non-alphabetic languages, such as Chinese, has been a decades-long problem. Chinese dictation using large vocabulary speech recognition provides a convenient mode of text entry. In contrast to a character based dictation system, a word-based Mandarin dictation system has been designed (based on Apple's PlainTalk speech recognition technology for efficient entry of Chinese characters into a computer. New features and improvements to the dictation system are presented. The new features and improvements have produced an overall reduction in recognition error of 50-80%. The vocabulary has also been increased from 5000 words to over 11000 words.