Definition of the most common words and expressions in the world of digital dictation and speech recognition, which might not be known by visitors.

Acoustical adaptation
Process which continuously improves an author’s acoustic references. This is done by analysing dictations and automatically updating the ARF to understand an author’s voice better.

Acoustical reference file (ARF)
Statistical data which describes the voice characteristics of an individual user. This can include the user’s accent, pronunciation, input device, etc

Context adaptation
Process which updates an author's language model and Context Lexicon (dictionary) in order to improve the recognition rate

Digital dictation
The process of recording dictations on digital media. There are many digital media available, from the hard disk of your computer to SD card, X-Picture cards, memory sticks, …

Digital input device
Input device which converts speech into digital audio data signals, e.g. digital mobile recorder microphone, etc.

Digital Speech Standard

Digital Speech Standard (.dss) is a digital speech recording standard which was jointly developed and introduced by Olympus, Grundig and Phillips in 1994.
The introduction of .dss marked the establishment of a compatibility standard for digital audio files in speech format that drastically reduces both file size and transfer volume for speech recordings
Read more at http://www.olympus.co.uk/consumer/2590_6730.htm

Processing power
Refers to a computer’s ability to compute data. A piece of software will have minimum processing power requirements to run properly.

Recognition Rate
Percentage of words correctly recognized when dictating. Sometimes referred to as recognition accuracy

Sound format
Describes the format of the file holding a dictation. Examples include MP3, WAV, WMA…

Sound compression
When a digital sound file is recorded, for best results, it must be compressed. In the case of dictation for instance, only voice frequencies are useful, and so low and high frequencies are truncated. There are many methods to compress a sound file. The most common compressions for digital dictation are DSS and Philips CELP.