Educational Technology Innovation and Impact/Assistive Technology/Speech Recognition Software

Speech recognition software, often referred to as Voice recognition software is very useful for people who are better at speaking than writing. A piece of software that recognises what you are actually saying and transcribes it for you, gone are the days of messy handwriting! Think about it, a computer has no problems with spelling and presents your thoughts and idea's perfectly for you. You would not have to write and then manually type out your thoughts ever again.

Speech recognition is an area that has progressed rapidly over the last few years. However, it still has its limitations. For example the dyslexic website bring it to our attention that in order to use the piece of software people have had to go through an often lengthy process, sometimes taking up to an hour for the software to recognise your own voice (Dyslexic Website 2006)

This process may be appealing to people that have a speech impediment, however, for someone who is an avid or fluent reader this can be a very painstaking way of getting the computer to discriminate between your voice and someone else’s.

We must remember that computers cannot recognise and transcribe a conversation. The text needs to be dictated, which is an art form in itself. The computer cannot recognise "uums" and "ahhs" and so each spoken word must be clearly dictated to the machine.

The more recent dictation software that has been developed by Dragon, who are the world leaders in speech recognition software estimate full stops and commas for the dictator. This is a major breakthrough for speech recognition software users. The most used software being the ‘Dragon Naturally Speaking’, its developers Dragon claim that it allows you to speak up to 160 words per minute whilst maintaining 99% accuracy (Speech Recognition Website 2006)

There are various ways that you can dictate to a computer, for example the most common method used is to dictate directly into your PC using a headset microphone connected into the soundcard or USB. The Dragon product allows complete mobility and users can even dictate into hand held devices such as PDAs or a Tablet PC and then synchronize the mobile device to a PC so the software can transcribe the voice file into a normal text document.

Originally the early versions of speech recognition software were aimed at people with disabilities such as dyslexia. The new pieces of software such as ‘Naturally Speaking’ can create 900 word documents in less than 6 minutes. So the advantages are endless and more and more professions are choosing this purely to increase the efficiency of their business.

References: http://www.speechrecognition.com/dns8.php (accessed 26 April 2006) http://www.dyslexic.com/dictcomp.htm (accessed 26 April 2006)