Humans, Machines, and Conversations

This essay investigates the design of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies as a site at which the human qualities of ‘hearing’ and ‘understanding’ are mimicked in machines. On the basis of an observational study, it explains the major work components and debates in ASR, such as research paradigms and strategies, as well as the intricacies of instruments and experimentation. Key arguments concern the tensions, conflicts, and ambiguities that emerge from the intersection of disparate research paradigms in ASR. The study emphasizes the actors’ success in establishing a local context of stable, practical rationality in which they negotiate the complementary and conflicting research objectives of building speech recognition machines, on one hand, and understanding human hearing, on the other. The conclusion is cast in terms of a ‘functional contingency’, a concept that characterizes this setting in which researchers successfully make machines ‘recognize speech’ and in so doing make the machines part of specific types of ‘conversation’.

[1]  T Dau,et al.  A quantitative model of the "effective" signal processing in the auditory system. I. Model structure. , 1996, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[2]  B. Moore An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing , 1977 .

[3]  T. Pinch Confronting nature : the sociology of solar-neutrino detection , 1986 .

[4]  B. Latour Science in Action , 1987 .

[5]  Trevor Pinch,et al.  "Testing - One, Two, Three ... Testing!": Toward a Sociology of Testing , 1993 .

[6]  Scott D. Sagan,et al.  Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance, Donald MacKenzie, 1990. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 500 pages. ISBN: 0-262-13258-3. $29.95 , 1990 .

[7]  M. Lynch,et al.  3. The Sociology of a Genetic Engineering Technique: Ritual and Rationality in the Performance of the "Plasmid Prep" , 1992 .

[8]  T. Pinch,et al.  The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology might Benefit Each Other , 1984 .

[9]  Hélène Mialet Reading Hawking’s Presence: An Interview with a Self‐Effacing Man , 2003, Critical Inquiry.

[10]  Harry M. Collins,et al.  Artificial experts - social knowledge and intelligent machines , 1990, Inside technology.

[11]  T. Dau,et al.  A quantitative model of the "effective" signal processing in the auditory system. II. Simulations and measurements. , 1996, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[12]  Michael Lynch,et al.  Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science: A Study of Shop Work and Shop Talk in a Research Laboratory , 1985 .

[13]  Don H. Zimmerman,et al.  Ethnomethodology and the Human Sciences , 1994 .

[14]  Jürgen Tchorz Auditory-based signal processing for noise suppression and robust speech recognition , 2000 .

[15]  H. Collins Four kinds of knowledge, two (or maybe three) kinds of embodiment, and the question of artificial intelligence , 2000 .

[16]  T Shedd TESTING ONE, TWO, THREE , 1975 .

[17]  Graham Button,et al.  Published in: Technology in Working Order: Studies of Work, Interaction, and Technology, , 2022 .

[18]  S. Shapin Laboratory life. The social construction of scientific facts , 1981, Medical History.

[19]  Susan Leigh Star,et al.  Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice by H. M. Collins (review) , 1988, Technology and Culture.

[20]  D. Haraway Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature , 1990 .

[21]  武田 一哉,et al.  Workshop on Robust Methods for Speech Recognition in Adverse Conditions報告 , 1999 .

[22]  Lucy Suchman Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication , 1987 .

[23]  E. Schegloff,et al.  A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation , 1974 .

[24]  H. Dreyfus What Computers Can't Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence , 1978 .

[25]  L. Suchman,et al.  Understanding practice: Artificial intelligence as craftwork , 1993 .

[26]  Ernst Günter Schukat-Talamazzini,et al.  Automatische Spracherkennung - Grundlagen, statistische Modelle und effiziente Algorithmen , 1995, Künstliche Intelligenz.

[27]  G. Button Ethnomethodology and the human sciences: Contributors , 1991 .

[28]  Richard C. Jennings,et al.  Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life , 1988, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

[29]  M. Lynch Scientific practice and ordinary action : ethnomethodology and social studies of science , 1994 .

[30]  Trevor Pinch,et al.  Book-Review - the Golem - what Everyone Should Know about Science , 1993 .

[31]  Steve Young,et al.  The HTK book , 1995 .

[32]  Birger Kollmeier,et al.  On the interplay between auditory-based features and locally recurrent neural networks for robust speech recognition in noise , 1997, EUROSPEECH.

[33]  Hynek Hermansky,et al.  Should recognizers have ears? , 1998, Speech Commun..

[34]  J. L. Heilbron,et al.  The uses of experiment: studies in the natural sciences , 1990, Medical History.

[35]  Cyrus C. M. Mody A Little Dirt Never Hurt Anyone: , 2001 .

[36]  M. Douglas,et al.  Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. , 1967 .

[37]  Hynek Hermansky,et al.  Towards increasing speech recognition error rates , 1995, Speech Commun..

[38]  R. Bauman,et al.  Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking: Index of names , 1989 .

[39]  Jessica Riskin,et al.  The Defecating Duck, or, the Ambiguous Origins of Artificial Life , 2003, Critical Inquiry.

[40]  David Pearce,et al.  The aurora experimental framework for the performance evaluation of speech recognition systems under noisy conditions , 2000, INTERSPEECH.

[41]  Biing-Hwang Juang,et al.  Fundamentals of speech recognition , 1993, Prentice Hall signal processing series.

[42]  K. Knorr-Cetina The Manufacture of Knowledge: an Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science , 1985 .

[43]  S. Woolgar,et al.  The Manufacture of Knowledge: an Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science , 1982 .

[44]  E. Owens,et al.  An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing , 1997 .

[45]  David H. DeVorkin,et al.  Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance , 1990 .