A chip architecture claimed to speed up speech recognition by ten times over general purpose PC processors has been developed by Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU).

“Whether running an enterprise-class voice call-in centre or decoding individual words on a cell phone, all of today’s serious speech recognisers exist as software running on some processor. That’s terribly limiting,” said Professor Rob A. Rutenbar, who leads the In Silico Vox project at CMU.

“Moving these computations directly into silicon means we can perform recognition dramatically faster, cheaper, and better for both commercial and homeland security tasks,” he said.

CMU’s architecture is exclusively dedicated to speech recognition and performs it more efficiently than current PCs. The US Homeland Security department is said to be very keen on CMU’s programme because it will help them ‘audio-mine’, and translate huge streams of incoming audio data, sifting for critical words or phrases.