Code of Ethics for Automatic Speech Recognition

Abstract

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), which turns human speech into text, has had a long history of development and continues to improve and expand. Both academic and industry discussions on the technology present ethical issues regarding the privacy, security, and use of user data, as well the accuracy of ASR for different demographics. This paper reviews the literature on such ethical issues and proposes a code of ethics that addresses them. A case study on Google ASR products is conducted, evaluating that the industry still has improvements to make, especially in user data collection and use, and in accuracy.