Automatic speech recognition in practice

There is a growing interest in the commercial possibilities offered by automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology. Unfortunately the prospective user has little independent guidance with respect to the potential success of any proposed implementation. There do exist a few general human factors guidelines on the use of ASR, but most of the corpus of knowledge that forms part of the lore within the ASR community is based on the unpublished experiences of system.developers and users themselves. The present paper attempts to redress this balance; it is a summary of the experiences of users and system designers at 30 research and commercial sites in the UK and USA where ASR has been extensively used or tested. The application represented were classified as vehicle, office, industrial, and aids for disabled people. A number of important human factors issues were identified, and the relative success of the various applications are discussed.