One could train a speech recognizer with words or phonemes. I guess that they both have their pros and cons:
- with words there would be a lower error rate as phonemes can be put together building a non-existing word (this case would be impossible with word training)
- using words would require a larger database and more space and processing time
- phonemes are way more general: with all phonemes you can build all existing words, but with all the words in the database you can't recognize all the words in the language
I'm wondering if there is a reason to prefer one over another, or if in some cases one is better than the other. Do both methods have practical applications? Which ones? What are their pros and cons (apart from the ones I named, which may be wrong so feel free to correct me)?