Yes, technology will help to enhance our sense of independence. But if I might refer back to Shane Feldman’s blog about hearing aids and earning capacity, it is as some of the comments to that post have mentioned - as great as such technology might be, it cannot resolve the attitudinal barriers that we still encounter in the hearing world.

While this technology might indeed reduce those communication barriers that are the primary thing that most hearing people are concerned with, they will not necessarily raise the level of sensitivity, understanding, and acceptance of deafness, Deaf Culture, or the Deaf Community.

This can be clearly seen in the example shown on yet another DeafDC post - Bobby Cox talking about the use of IP-Relay to make prank calls.

While I am all for on-going research into using technology to benefit the Deaf Community, I also think it has to be balanced - as Shane says - with educational programs and ongoing efforts to reduce those attitudes and biases which serve as the actual barriers.

Persons who hang up on relay calls, companies that refuse to caption their videos, employers who won’t purchase ttys or assistive listening devices…

All the best technology in the world won’t help us if we can’t resolve problems such as these.

http://www.netac.rit.edu/publication/asr.html

From RIT’s website:

>>In the absence of practical automatic speech recognition systems, NTID has been active in the development and application of operator-assisted speech recognition since 1981 when it acquired the first model of a stenographer-assisted speech-to-text system. ASR was introduced in selected NTID/RIT classes in February, 1982, and with large audiences of deaf adults at a convention of the A.G. Bell Association for the Deaf in Portland, Oregon, in June, 1984.

When I do find a mic, I’ll take their “test drive.” And for my first attempt, I’ll be sure to intone “With all due respect…”

i’ve also been aware of DRAGON. what may be new about spinvox is that it doesn’t seem to require time to learn one’s speech patterns. one commenter says it does. maybe he/she’s right. but the fact that it automatically transcribes podcasts @ livejournal definitely gives me the impression that it doesn’t. like i said, i’d appreciate more info.

and do check out the screen on the website. of course, for all we know it’s really human transcribers doing the work, a la malzel’s machine.

voice-to-text software has been around for a while. the most popular is DRAGON (IBM), and i’m unsure if that’s an acronym or not. There’s another brand but DRAGON has like 80% of the market. In any case, both brands require time with the software so it “learns” your speech patterns. It’s also stand-alone so if I were to borrow your laptop and it had DRAGON installed, I would be a stranger to your licensed copy.

This is probably because speech discrimination by AI isn’t anywhere close to the reception/performance we can expect from any human. Not surprising since we would expect the same from an automated ASL interpreter, you know?

One immediate application for this is self-speech training. If people with perfect speech aren’t understood by the software right away then I assume you have to take great pains in order to be understood. It follows that when we’ve come to the point where it understands words, sentences, and even entire passages, then either anyone off the street should understand us… either that, or nobody will since accommodating the software could lead us to speak with a convoluted accent all our own?

btw, it already does podcasts, but it costs money. 75 cents a minute. it also automatically transcribes podcasts at livejournal if they’re less than 3 min long (http://www.stonedeafpilots.com/?p=58).