diff --git a/persephone/keras_model.py b/persephone/keras_model.py
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..5c9402c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/persephone/keras_model.py
@@ -0,0 +1,23 @@
+import keras
+
+class RNN_CTC_model:
+    """ An acoustic model with a LSTM/CTC architecture. 
+    
+    Uses Keras to define the model"""
+
+    def __init__(self, exp_dir: str, corpus_reader, num_layers: int = 3,
+            hidden_size: int=250, beam_width: int = 100,
+            decoding_merge_repeated: bool = True) -> None:
+        """Initialize a new model
+
+        Arguments:
+            exp_dir: Path that the experiment directory is located at
+            corpus_reader: `CorpusReader` object that provides access to the corpus
+                            this model is being trained on.
+            num_layers: number of layers in the network
+            hidden_size: the size, in nodes, of the hidden layers
+            beam_width: size of the beam width (used for the decoding)
+            decoding_merge_repeated: A flag to toggle behavior of repeating characters
+                                     if true "a b b b b c" becomes "a b c"
+        """
+        raise NotImplementedError
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/setup.py b/setup.py
index f95da2b..bb5b41b 100644
--- a/setup.py
+++ b/setup.py
@@ -23,6 +23,7 @@
            'nltk==3.2.5',
            'numpy==1.15.0',
            'python-speech-features==0.6',
+           'keras==2.2.2',
            'scipy==1.1.0',
            'tensorflow==1.10.0',
            'scikit-learn==0.19.1',