On 13 October, Anne Simpson at Strathclyde Uni. asked about the feasibility
of using speech recognition software to convert taped lectures into text.
There have been a number of useful responses, with the balance of opinion
erring toward the negative!! I concur with the majority right now - but
feel that if this question was posed again in a year, the answer could be
more positive.
I asked a similar question of Dragon Dictate last month, following the
launch of Naturally Speaking, hailed as a real 'continuous speech' facility.
However, the problem with this option - which they did demonstrate
reasonably successfully using taped speech from one of the new Sony digital
disc dictation machines - is that Naturally Speaking has been tailored to
the sole user environment and cannot accommodate more than one voice profile.
This would clearly be an issue for any student hoping to employ this
technique for automating the 'lectures-to-notes' process, since any course
is likely to benefit from the wisdom (and words!) of a dozen different
lecturers.
I do still believe that an accessible, affordable scenario will emerge in
the not too distant future!
Alison Cox
ACCESS Centre Manager
Stevenson College, Edinburgh
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