Speech recognition in the secondary school classroom: an exploratory study

Voice recognition software has improved dramatically over the past two or t hree years in terms of accuracy and usability and, at the same time, the co sts of the software have been reduced significantly. While dictation softwa re has so far been used predominantly in the medical and legal professions, it has been suggested that the software may benefit schoolchildren who hav e difficulties with spelling and writing. This paper reports an an explorat ory study in which a group of second year secondary school pupils with read ing ages ranging from 8.3 to 12.9 performed a set of tasks using the IBM Vo iceType dictation package. The tasks involved normal classroom dictation by a teacher, the use of the keyboard to input the same text, the use of the dictation software to dictate the text to the computer, and the use of the dictation software to write a story based on a set of pictures. The results showed that the children could input text more quickly using voice dictati on compared with keyboard entry, and that accuracy was acceptable and impro ving with practice. The implications of these findings for the use of dicta tion software in the classroom are discussed along with some directions for further research. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.