N-Best Recognition

N-Best Recognition allows the Speech Recognizer to return more than one result if there are several branches in the grammar that sound like the utterance. This allows the application to choose the best result based on additional criteria.

In some advanced voice applications, a single result may not be sufficient. For example, an airline reservation application might ask the user for destination and departure cities. The speech-recognition engine might not be able to distinguish between the two possible utterances that can sound the same or similar like "Austin" and "Boston." ideally, the application would obtain both these possible results so that it could prompt for clarification, "Did you mean Austin, Texas; or Boston, Massachusetts?"

Using N-best recognition, the speech-recognition engine returns a list of different possible utterances whose confidence levels are high enough for consideration.