A basic problem in speech recognition
		• We cannot identify phonemes perfectly in noisy speech – The acoustic input is often ambiguous: there are several different words that fit the acoustic signal equally well. • People use their understanding of the meaning of the utterance to hear the right word. – We do this unconsciously – We are very good at it • This means speech recognizers have to know which words are likely to come next and which are not. – Can this be done without full understanding?