Multi-stream speech recognition: ready for prime time?

Multi-stream and multi-band methods can improve the accuracy of speech recognition systems without overly increasing the complexity. However, they cannot be applied blindly. In this paper, we review our experience applying multi-stream and multiband methods to the Broadcast News corpus. We found that multi-stream systems using different acoustic front-ends provide a significant improvement over single stream systems. However, despite the fact that they have been successful on smaller tasks, we have not yet been able to show any improvement using multiband methods. We report various insights gained from the experience in applying these methods in a large-vocabulary task.