phoneme

Phonemes are the smallest phonetic units of human speech. There are many applications where human speech has to be recognized or even imitated by software programs.

Speech recognition is one example, speech synthesis, voice recognition, text-to-speech( TTS), speech-to-speech and speech-to-text( STT) are others. All these techniques are concerned with decomposing speech into minute sonic distinctions or re-generating speech from such small sound units. Since speech itself is highly complex and represents an enormous volume of data when digitized, phonemes are used in which the characteristic speech features are preserved while at the same time the volume of data is enormously reduced.