ling representative. Making speech recognition and IVR user friendly is an important factor in ensuring callers' acceptance of the service. How Speech Recognition Works Speech recognition works by first detecting and then capturing parts of spoken words (utterances). After removing background noise, it converts the captured utterances to a digital representation. Capturing the speech and digitally representing it is done by DSPs on high-speed specialized computer chips. The speech recognition software then breaks the sounds into small chunks and compares various properties of the chunks of sound to large amounts of previously captured data contained in a database. Speech recognition systems can be either speaker dependent or speaker independent. Speaker independent systems such as those used by Amtrak, Apple, and the United States toll free directory are speaker independent. They recognize words spoken by large numbers of people. Originally, speaker independent systems recognized a limited number of words such as yes, no, and numeric digits. However, improved recognition and faster computer chips now enable speaker independent systems to recognize large vocabularies of words. Speaker dependent systems include Nuance's speech recognition software for consumers. Nuance also offers www.TechnicalPDF.com speech recognition software for specialized professions that use specific vocabularies. This includes radiologists who use speech recognition to dictate reports on results of medical imaging exams such as x-rays and MRIs. Speaker dependent software needs to be "trained" to recognize a particular person's commands. This is accomplished by having the purchaser of the speech recognition software read a few passages of text until the software recognizes the person's speech pattern. Natural language speech recognition systems are those with the ability to recognize speech where users don't use specific, predefined commands such as "copy the phrase hello Mary", or "cut yours truly" as found in desk-top speech recognition ap