Hello all,
Our previously very busy listserv is currently VERY quiet. I will assume for
the moment that it isn't something I said, but I do wonder whether some of you
out there, who have not had good experiences with it, have backed away from
speech recognition, as we occasionally hear from folks in our area. Hopefully,
you all are just busy with your students and don't have time to attend to
luxuries such as this listserv. Of course if you ARE too busy, you may not
even see this message, but I hope to get an update from some of you.
I know that speech recognition is one of the hot topics out there in assistive
technology - last year at CSUN, mention of it in a presentation title was a
guarantee for a full room and it was one of the hot topics in a panel I
participated in at LDOnline. What's more, my clinical practice is currently
overrun with people who want to use speech recognition, and for some kids (and
adults) it is working great, while for some it is not. My question is how
continuous speech is going out there for kids of all ages? We continue to see
a LOT of interest among parents and some teachers in the potential of SR for
their kids. The problem is that most of them know only about continuous
speech, and go out and buy NaturallySpeaking (DNS) or something else, and then
drop it in frustration after a trial period with no training or advice outside
whatever the companies' tech support offers.
In the meantime, I have seen at least 3 people in the past month who came in
saying they could not use speech recognition, by which they meant continuous -
or at least had had VERY great difficulties getting it to work for them, and
based on my judgment of their voices and cognitive styles, would NOT do well
with continuous - who wound up leaving our session loving DragonDictate. All
these people happened to have motor-speech disorders, but other students with
LD have had similar problems. My informal guess is that fifty percent of the
people (mostly kids, some young adults) who come into my office to be
evaluated for continuous speech recognition (because that is all they know)
wind up leaving with a recommendation for discrete, specifically for
DragonDictate. Some of those who think they want continuous speech wind up
abandoning it because of the difficulties they encounter in actual usage.
We have had a chance to use DNS for Teens for a couple of weeks now. It
certainly seems to be better at recognizing adolescent voices, but the
continuous speech language processing and monitoring problems remain. If you
are having difficulties with older versions of DNS with a kid, try it out, but
be aware that some of the usage issues remain.
Question 1: Where are people thinking now with regard to discrete vs.
continuous speech? Some of you were going to try continuous this year; how's
it going?
Question 2: Does anyone else have any kids who began using continuous but
switch back to discrete?
Question 3: Just looking for miscellaneous thoughts on speech recognition in
schools or at home.
The Speak2Write project is beginning our 2nd year this Fall in a couple of new
schools and we hope to have some interesting new perspectives within a couple
of months.
Bob Follansbee
BobMoshe@aol.com
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