Critical success factors for automatic speech recognition in the classroom

This study looked at continuous automated speech recognition (ASR) to an audience in a university lecture theatre and ran an evaluation based on a previous experiment by Ryba, McIvor, Shakir and Paez, which found that nonnative speakers of English were much more favorable towards the use of ASR in class than native speakers. Our evaluation was done on a class of 29 students composed entirely of non-native speakers/ A strong indicator of the level of engagement with the technology was the linguistic ability of the user -- the weaker the student's English, the more he or she tended to look at the textual output, the greater distraction experienced through poor recognition and also the greater impatience felt with slow recognition. There also seemed to be cultural differences -- the Chinese students appeared to look at the textual output much more than Indian students. We conclude that the 2 axes around which successful classroom speech recognition occurs are those of accuracy and unobtrusiveness. The more accurate and unobtrusive the technology, the more successful will be the automatically transcribed lecture.