Kind of. Both RBMs and HMMs are a mean to squeeze statistics out of something so that you can take the something away and still know what it looked like. RBMs a

Kind of. Both RBMs and HMMs are a mean to squeeze statistics out of something so that you can take the something away and still know what it looked like. RBMs are a bit more involved (and hence a whole lot slower, which still matters in speech recognition), while HMMs are simpler but good enough for people to stick to them (frustratingly for all the people who propose something fancier)