I am an advanced developer of PHP. I want to make a custom speech recognition app in PHP but not in English, I want to make it in Punjabi. Can you tell me where can I start? What approach would you follow? There are many English speech to text apps but I want to make one of Punjabi. This is my dream project for my native language.
Normally for PHP I think of web applications. The challenge with speech recognition is how do you capture speech on the web. There are some mechanisms to do this. Chrome supports speech recognition for text input. See http://slides.html5rocks.com/#speech-input and http://www.filosophy.org/2011/03/talking-to-the-web-the-basics-of-html5-speech-input/.
These use the following tag for speech recognition:
<input type=”text” speech x-webkit-speech />
I believe Chrome is the only browser that currently supports this. For some more info, see Speech to text conversion php,javascript or flash online. For other browsers, people have used Flash or Java in the web page to capture speech and send it to a speech engine for processing.
To support a specific language like Punjabi you'll have to research the various speech engines that are available. I don't know of any that currently support Punjabi, but for a good overview of different speech technologies Text-to-speech (voice generation) and speech-to-text (voice recognition) APIs? might be a good place to start.