To perform speech recognition with HMMs involves calculating the likelihood that each model emitted the observed speech. You can skip 9.4.1 Vector Quantization.
Jurafsky & Martin – Section 9.2 – The HMM Applied to Speech
Introduces some notation and the basic concepts of HMMs.
Ladefoged (Elements) – Chapter 6 – Hearing
Some understanding of human hearing will be helpful for engineering suitable features to extract from the waveform for automatic speech recognition.
