Topic 76

Social impact of speech-enabled input/output by Tomer Lapidot

Voice recognition programs should revolutions the computer world. Imagine how nice and simple it would to command a computer simply by telling it what to do. Word processing alone would become a much quicker task if one is simply saying what he or she wants the computer to type. However, with today’s technology, voice recognition programs are far from flawless, and the advanced ones are far too expensive for the average user.

1. What are the issues involved in ITGS?
2. How did this technology emerge?
3. How are the stake holders?
4. What are the advantages and disadvantages for these stake holders?

The ITGS issue is whether or not voice recognition programs are efficient enough to be utilized, and perhaps what problems can occur with them. The voice recognition technology emerged from the combination of word processing programs and hardware such as the computer microphone. Many companies attempted to ease the process of typing for the sake of convenience, however many problems arise with this technology although it may seem great to lay back and tell the computer to type.

The stake holder is in fact the average computer user, which expects the computer to make life easier for him or her, which voice recognition can do, however some problems and limitation come into play. A common problem with voice recognition is distinguishing between similar sounding words such as ‘where’ versus ‘were’, ‘then’ versus ‘than’, and ‘ate’ versus ‘eight’, a program would have to be very intelligent to understand to context of a sentence to match the appropriate word to it, such intelligence can not be found among today’s technology.

Another problem would be noise, which can interfere with the recording of speech process. Limitation such as speed may also make voice recognition less efficient is speed. The speed of a good typist varies from 80 to 120 words per minute, while to speak clearly, only 40 words per minute can be said. Nonetheless a major advantage of voice recognition is avoiding wrist pain.

5. What solutions can overcome the problems?
6. What areas of impact does it affect?
7. Evaluate the impact locally and globally.

The only solution to avoid voice recognition flaws is to wait until computers can reason out human language, or perhaps achieve artificial intelligence. Unless computers reach those intelligence levels, voice recognition would remain inefficient and perhaps frustrating to the average user. Should someday humans use such technology, some tasks may become easier with the voice recognition’s abilities, but microphones will never replace the keyboard due to human speech’s speed limitation. Perhaps the major impact of voice recognition, both locally and globally, will be for simple tasks such as application opening, internet and file browsing, and other similar operations.

A more feasible computer speech aspect would be voice output rather input. Should a computer be able to explain operations verbally, perhaps error notifications will become more understandable, and allow the computer to sound more ‘intelligent’. However, once again, unless the computer can form sentences of his own o communicate with the user, vocal output holds no major advantage. Intelligent use of speech input and output will not be very efficient until computers reach what we call artificial intelligence.

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Social impact of speech-enabled input/output by Tomer Lapidot (Edited by Nitish Gautam)

Voice recognition programs should revolutionize the computer world. Imagine how nice and simple it would to command a computer simply by telling it what to do. Word processing alone would become a much quicker task if one is simply saying what he or she wants the computer to type. However, with today’s technology, voice recognition programs are far from flawless, and the advanced ones are far too expensive for the average user. One such example is Microsoft Word and some other open source software/shareware.
Let us define and explain in terms of an encyclopedia. (wikipedia.org)
Speech recognition (in many contexts also known as 'automatic speech recognition', computer speech recognition or erroneously as Voice Recognition) is the process of converting a speech signal to a sequence of words, by means of an algorithm implemented as a computer program. Speech recognition applications that have emerged over the last few years include voice dialing (e.g., Call home), call routing (e.g., I would like to make a collect call), simple data entry (e.g., entering a credit card number), preparation of structured documents (e.g., a radiology report), and content-based spoken audio search (e.g. find a podcast where particular words were spoken).Voice recognition or speaker recognition is a related process that attempts to identify the person speaking, as opposed to what is being said. (Wikipedia.org)
1. What are the issues involved in ITGS?
The ITGS issue is whether or not voice recognition programs are efficient enough to be utilized, and perhaps what problems can occur with them. Some other problems might be related to speech identification, verification and processing.

2. How did this technology emerge?
The voice recognition technology emerged from the combination of word processing programs and hardware such as the computer microphone.
Many companies attempted to ease the process of typing for the sake of convenience, however many problems arise with this technology although it may seem great to lay back and tell the computer to type.

3. How are the stake holders?
The stake holder is in fact the average computer user, which expects the computer to make life easier for him or her, which voice recognition can do, however some problems and limitations come into play.

4. What are the advantages and disadvantages for these stake holders?
A common problem with voice recognition is distinguishing between similar sounding words such as ‘where’ versus ‘were’, ‘then’ versus ‘than’, and ‘ate’ versus ‘eight’, a program would have to be very intelligent to understand to context of a sentence to match the appropriate word to it, such intelligence can not be found among today’s technology.

Another problem would be noise, which can interfere with the recording of speech process. Limitation such as speed may also make voice recognition less efficient is speed. The speed of a good typist varies from 80 to 120 words per minute, while to speak clearly, only 40 words per minute can be said. Nonetheless a major advantage of voice recognition is avoiding wrist pain.

5. What solutions can overcome the problems?
The only solution to avoid voice recognition flaws is to wait until computers can reason out human language, or perhaps achieve artificial intelligence. Unless computers reach those intelligence levels, voice recognition would remain inefficient and perhaps frustrating to the average user. Should someday humans use such technology, some tasks may become easier with the voice recognition’s abilities, but microphones will never replace the keyboard due to human speech’s speed limitation.
Although there are many problems, solutions have come into place with time. Although these do not solve the problem completely, they somewhat limit them. Microsoft Word (Microsoft Office Word is Microsoft's flagship word processing software. – Wikipedia.org) has a solution where the software (MS WORD) gets used to the voice through simple steps. It presents a wizard where it asks the user to speak simple words or sentences in order to get used to his voice. Other shareware software have better solutions. Adding extras and other hardware might improve the experience.

6. What areas of impact does it affect?
Perhaps the major impact of voice recognition, both locally and globally, will be for simple tasks such as application opening, internet and file browsing, and other similar operations.

7. Evaluate the impact locally and globally.
A more feasible computer speech aspect would be voice output rather input. Should a computer be able to explain operations verbally, perhaps error notifications will become more understandable, and allow the computer to sound more ‘intelligent’. However, once again, unless the computer can form sentences of his own o communicate with the user, vocal output holds no major advantage. Intelligent use of speech input and output will not be very efficient until computers reach what we call artificial intelligence.