segmentation algorithm these parameters are silence threshold silence duration minimum segment length and maximum segment length silence threshold is an amplitude value used to determine if a digitized speech sample is silence or not all speech samples with an amplitude less than the silence threshold are considered to be silence the silence duration is the minimum duration in time that consecutive digitized speech samples all of which are silence must occur before that sequence of samples is considered a silence gap if fewer consecutive samples occur then the stretch of samples is not considered to be a silence gap the minimum segment length is the minimum duration in time that must occur without silence gaps before a sequence of samples is considered a segment this time value is usually the minimum amount of time that a phoneme is expected to take in the speech to be processed by the automated segmentation algorithm the maximum segment length is the maximum duration in time that can occur without silence gaps and still be considered a single segment this time value is usually the maximum amount of time that a phoneme is expected to take in the speech to be processed by the automated segmentation algorithm the maximum segment length may also be the time constant of the word recognition algorithm such as a hidden markov model stochastic analysis method to which the neural network phoneme recognition algorithm will provide a stream of phoneme codes in this example of the automatic segmentation algorithm the four parameters described above are used when performing a single 34 pass 34 of the digitized speech samples during this pass the segmentation algorithm creates the largest possible non overlapping segments out of the samples all of the created.