The objective of this paper is to describe some preliminary results of the activity that is being carried out in IRST laboratories for the development of an HMM-based speaker independent continuous speech recognition system for the Italian language. The recognition system is being developed using the acoustic-phonetic continuous speech portion of APASCI database, also described in this paper. Performance is reported for different recognition tasks that were considered: without any phonetic constraint, the system provided a 72% Phone Accuracy; further, given a vocabulary size of 1019 words and no lexical constraints, a 73% Word Accuracy was achieved.
Keywords: Speaker Independent Continuous Speech Recognition, Speech Databases, Hidden Markov Models.