In our work in speech recognition, we found that it is necessary to encode this type of information in order to recognize speech patterns. For example, the words “step” and “steep” are very similar. Although the [e] phoneme in “step” and the [E] in “steep” are somewhat different vowel sounds (in that they have different resonant frequencies), it is not reliable to distinguish these two words based on these often confusable vowel sounds. It is much more reliable to consider the observation that the [e] in “step” is relatively brief compared with the [E] in “steep.”
