METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR PRESENTING IMAGES REPRESENTATIVE OF AN UTTERANCE WITH CORRESPONDING DECODED SPEECH

Apparatus for presenting images representative of one or more words in an utterance with corresponding decoded speech includes, in one aspect, a visual detector for capturing images of body movements (e.g., lip and/or mouth movements) corresponding to the one or more words in the utterance coupled to a visual feature extractor. The visual feature extractor receives time information from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system and operatively processes the captured images from the visual detector to generate one or more image segments based on the time information relating to one or more decoded words in the utterance, each image segment corresponding to a decoded word in the utterance. An image player coupled to the visual feature extractor presents an image segment with a corresponding decoded word. The image segment may be presented as an animation of successive images in time, whereby a user is provided multiple sources of information for comprehending the utterance and can more easily ascertain the relationship between the body movements and the corresponding decoded speech.