Speech Technology - A Theoretical and Practical Introduction

In recent years, speech recognition devices have become central to our everyday lives. Systems such as Siri, Alexa, speech-to-text, and automated telephone services, are built by people applying expertise in sound structure and natural language processing to generate computer programmes that can recognise and understand speech. This exciting new advancement has led to a rapid growth in speech technology courses being added to linguistics programmes; however, there has so far been a lack of material serving the needs of students who have limited or no background in computer science or mathematics. This textbook addresses that need, by providing an accessible introduction to the fundamentals of computer speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition technology, covering both neural and non-neural approaches. It explains the basic concepts in non-technical language, providing step-by-step explanations of each formula, practical activities and ready-made code for students to use, which is also available on an accompanying website.

List of contents

1. Overview; 2. Speech; 3. Finite-state language modeling; 4. Statistical language models; 5. Non-neural synthesis; 6. Non-neural recognition; 7. Neural nets; 8. Neural synthesis; 9. Neural recognition; 10. Other technologies.

About the author

Michael Hammond is Full Professor in the Department of Linguistics at The University of Arizona. His work focuses on phonology, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. His notable publications include The Phonology of English (OUP, 1999) and Python for Linguists (CUP, 2020).

Product details

• Authors: Michael Hammond
• Publisher: Cambridge Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 31.03.2026
• EAN: 9781009606684
• ISBN: 978-1-009-60668-4
• Illustrations: Worked examples or Exercises
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative linguistics; LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General, Communications engineering / telecommunications, Computational Linguistics, Computational and corpus linguistics, Speech recognition, For graduate / post-graduate and equivalents, Textbook, coursework