Enhancing mobility through speech recognition technology

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology provides what many regard as the most natural and efficient mode of human-computer interaction: talk to a computer and receive a spoken response in reply. Over the last decade, the technology for ASR has undergone rapid improvements. This has been primarily due to advances in the techniques for analysing the incoming speech, and the general trend towards enhanced computing power in terms of faster processing, increased memory capacities, coupled with an overall reduction in the physical size of hardware. One result of these developments has been consideration of ASR technology in a greater number of application areas, including some which had previously been viewed as 'hostile' to the use of speech input. The group of applications requiring speech recognisers to be truly portable would have fallen into this category. However, it is now possible with the aid of a small radio transmitter for individuals to use ASR as a mode of communication to link to remote computers systems, even when some distance from them. Despite realisation of the feasibility of the mobile speech recogniser, there are still a number of design issues which need to be addressed. This paper focuses on the psychological aspects of using this type of ASR technology, and identifies those areas which, from a user perspective, require further consideration.