Goats to sheep: Can recognition rate be improved for poor tangora speakers?

Abstract

This paper reports on a study of recognition performance for a group of new users during their first month of experience with the TANGORA system. TANGORA is a 20,000 word, speaker dependent, isolated-word system which transcribes speech input into text in real-time. Twelve users, six males and six females, participated in 21 sessions each, during which they read aloud unrelated sentences selected from a corpus of office correspondence. Their goal was to develop a speaking style which minimized TANGORA's recognition error. Hypotheses were generated about users' speech habits which may have lead to increased recognition error and suggestions were made to them on how to modify their speaking style accordingly. On average, recognition errors decreased by 33% from the first to the fourth week. Some characteristics of successful speakers have been identified.