Parakeet: A Continuous Speech Recognition System for Mobile Touch-Screen Devices

Comments

Nic

Summary

In Parakeet: A Continuous Speech Recognition System for Mobile Touch-Screen Devices, the authors present a new voice-recognition application for mobile touch-screen devices to allow the user to input text into the device. Using the voice recognition, the user can read the text they want to enter, along with using a simple touch-based interface for making corrections and changing words. The features are as follows:

• Voice recognition software converts the spoken word into text.
• When the recognition is done, a beep lets the user know.
• The user can then scan the sentence and easily make changes to words. The words in the sentence are ordered at the top of the screen, and below in columns are examples of other possible words that sound like the word spoken, along with a delete button at the bottom. The user can either replace the word that was recognized, or delete the word altogether.
• If the software is completely unable to recognize the word, it will default to a keyboard entry with predictive text as seen in current mobile devices.

After doing a user study, they found that users were able to enter up to 18 words per minute while sitting still, and 13 words per minute while walking around. While it may seem small, it is easily comparable to the 10 - 20 words per minute that each user had while entering text using the traditional T9 text prediction system (using a keyboard).

Discussion

If implemented correctly and included on all new cell phones, this entry system would revolutionize the text messaging system. I know lots of people that are older than me that don't see the point of text messaging...but if they could just speak what they want to send, just like they're having a conversation over the phone, and send that as a text message, then they could be more comfortable with the system and send messages to users that use traditional typing methods. But, the words per minute would have to be a lot higher before I would use it because I already text almost as fast as I type on the computer. There would be a lot of idiots walking around talking into their phone like the people with bluetooth headsets though....