Writing with speech
Speaking in last Sunday's New York Times, novelist Richard Powers tells how he has used speech recognition on his TabletPC to compose all his writings of recent years.
It's a fine article - you could quote him almost anywhere on the obstacles of the keyboard, on SR speed and accuracy, on getting accustomed to talking to a machine, or on "speakos and mondegreens"... And it says so much about speech interface technology - it would have been inconceivable only 5 years ago.
One factor behind this is the productivity of the TabletPC correction UI:
I speak untethered, without a headset, into the slate’s microphone array. The words appear as fast as I can speak, or they wait out my long pauses. I touch them up with a stylus, scribbling or re-speaking as needed. Whole phrases die and revive, as quickly as I could have hit the backspace.
Stylus vs. Keyboard. Editing is more direct and efficient with the stylus than with mouse and keyboard, given the word-on-word nature of transcript editing. (And assuming Mr Powers is using TabletPC's built-in speech recognition UI - hats off to Rob and team who put it there!)
Having read, years ago, Galatea 2.2, I almost wish this article had gone behind the lines of the human interface and into the SR technology itself - the hum of the decoders, the scatter-charts of the acoustic models, the forced couplings of the words in the language models... If anyone can surface the poetry of a speech recognition engine, it's the writer who brought to life the neural networks of a fictional machine that is taught to listen and (heartbreakingly) to speak, in that book.
