Is Speech Recognition Finally 'Good Enough'?

jcatcw writes "Speech recognition software is fast, but it still may not be accurate enough. Clerical jobs usually ask for 40 wpm, but speech recognition software can keep up with someone speaking at 160 wpm. In Lamont Wood's demo it did very well at too/two/to and which/witch, but will it still render 'I really admire your analysis' as "I really admire urinalysis'? At 95% accuracy, people aren't jumping on the bandwagon. Wood's typing speed is about 60 wpm with 93% accuracy, so he found that using speech recognition was about twice as fast as typing. Those who type at hunt-and-peck speeds will experience results that are even more dramatic. There's really only one product on the US market: Dragon NaturallySpeaking from Nuance Communications. The free versions from Microsoft aren't up to the task and IBM sold ViaVoice to Nuance, where it's treated as an entry-level product."

Comments

Problems

[Tribbin]

As a foreigner it is really hard to get the pronounciation right enough.

Also command execution by others in the room is a problem.

How about listening to music, or TV, and having the computer interpreting it.

Good enough for what?

[traindirector]

TFA mentions that many people stop using speech recognition software because of poor accuracy. I don't think that's the major reason. I think they start using it because it's a neat idea that seems to have a lot of promise, but quickly realize there are only a few situations where it's actually helpful. The end of the article mentions rough drafts; I'd also say it might be a decent choice

• when you need to enter hand-written documents into a computer
• for transcripts of a single speaker
• informal free-thought when not surrounded by other people
• when you have horrible typing skills

For the majority of office tasks, it just isn't a good fit.

So if the "good enough" is being useful in any way whatsoever, it sounds like we're almost there.

Maybe the question should be...

[Mahjub Sa'aden]

Instead of asking if speech recognition is "good enough", maybe we should be asking whether or not it's actually useful for anything in the first place. I mean, is it good enough... to do what?

Can you imagine being in a cubicle farm full of people talking to their computers? Or trying to talk to your computer on the bus? You have to imagine that as computers become more ubiquitous, input methods will have to adjust alongside, and I simply can't see (or hear) speech recognition doing that very well.