Speech recognition technology for individuals with disabilities

There are estimated to be about 15 million people in the United States alone who are disabled to some degree, and it has been hypothesized that at least 10% of the world's population experience some sort of physical impairment. Although such statistics are always open to debate, this does not detract from the suggestion that one of the most promising application areas for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is in helping people with disabilities. It is within this context that the advantages of speech recognition are discussed, both in general and with specific relation to this user group. During the last decade, the development of more sophisticated techniques for analyzing incoming speech combined with the increased processing power of microcomputers has resulted in improved recognition performance. Consequently, speech recognizers are now either operational or being considered in a variety of industrial tasks and in office and aerospace environments. ASR applications specific to disabled users are reviewed under three areas: communication, environmental control, and medical applications. The demands made upon voice recognition technology are discussed and, apart from the perennial problem of misrecognitions, they are considered to be well within the scope of currently available commercial recognizers. The conclusion reached is that other factors, such as inadequate human factors engineering and the costs of the engineered solution, are primarily responsible for the slow growth of ASR applications for disabled users.