The limits of speech recognition

Continued research and development should be able to improve certain speech input, output, and dialogue applications. Speech recognition and generation is sometimes helpful for environments that are hands-busy, eyes-busy, mobility-required, or hostile and shows promise for telephone-based services. Dictation input is increasingly accurate, but adoption outside the disabled-user community has been slow compared to visual interfaces. Obvious physical problems include fatigue from speaking continuously and the disruption in an office filled with people speaking. By understanding the cognitive processes surrounding human “acoustic memory” and processing, interface designers may be able to integrate speech more effectively and guide users more successfully. By appreciating the differences between human-human interaction and human-computer interaction, designers may then be able to choose appropriate applications for human use of speech with computers. The key distinction may be the rich emotional content conveyed by prosody, or the pacing, intonation, and amplitude in spoken language. The emotive aspects of prosody are potent for human-human interaction but may be disruptive for human-computer interaction. The syntactic aspects of prosody, such as rising tone for questions, are important for a system’s recognition and generation of sentences. Now consider human acoustic memory and processing. Short-term and working memory are sometimes called acoustic or verbal memory. The part of Ben Shneiderman