  In recent decades, Speech interactive systems gained increasing importance.
To develop Dictation System like Dragon for Indian languages it is most
important to adapt the system to a speaker with minimum training. In this paper
we focus on the importance of creating speech database at syllable units and
identifying minimum text to be considered while training any speech recognition
system. There are systems developed for continuous speech recognition in
English and in few Indian languages like Hindi and Tamil. This paper gives the
statistical details of syllables in Telugu and its use in minimizing the search
space during recognition of speech. The minimum words that cover maximum
syllables are identified. This words list can be used for preparing a small
text which can be used for collecting speech sample while training the
dictation system. The results are plotted for frequency of syllables and the
number of syllables in each word. This approach is applied on the CIIL Mysore
text corpus which is of 3 million words.

Computation and Language;Human-Computer Interaction