BEAM. An accelerator for speech recognition

BEAM is a hardware accelerator that has been designed and built for real-time execution of the SPHINX speaker-independent, continuous-speech recognition system and similar systems. SPHINX on BEAM is able to recognize sentences from a 1000-word vocabulary and a perplexity-60 grammar in about 1.3 times real time. BEAM does not use any custom integrated circuits. The architecture of the accelerator is described. Performance data are given and compared with those for other architectures. It is concluded that BEAM demonstrates how general-purpose technology can be used to build systems that are substantially faster than general-purpose systems.<
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