How to handle homophones from Speech Service in LUIS?

Question

When using Speech-to-Text with LUIS, phrases like "I need a tee shirt" frequently come through as "I need a teacher".

Should these utterances be binned together if I need to increase the catch rate of "tee shirt" and don't need to distinguish from "teacher"?

Answer 1

Short answer is, no, you shouldn't bin them together. Really, that is just a band-aid and more than likely will just lead to other issues down the road.

Instead, there are several steps you can take:

1. Remind users to speak clearly and not too fast. This is generally good practice with any speech service.
2. For Speech Services, consider adding Custom Speech. Essentially, you provide additional audio to further train the service on what to recognize. This can include providing a Pronunciation Model to help the service distinguish between similar sounding words.
3. For LUIS, look at how many example utterances you have trained. Results tend to improve with more utterances. Recommendation is a minimum of five.
4. For LUIS, you can consider adding a Phrase List. I think your mileage will vary more here than with the other suggestions as I think the issue is more speech driven that LUIS driven, but it could help and requires little to setup.

Hope of help!