You Asked for It
December 2001

"Can you tell me something about the effectiveness of
Voice Recognition Technolgy (VRT)?"
- Ralph

Voice Recognition Technology (VRT) can be very helpful, but as with anything that seems good initially, it does have some drawbacks. VRT is touted as helping people work faster and more effectively. In selected cases, it does that.

For people who do not type well, it can certainly speed up processing time. For people who have injuries to the wrist and arm, VRT can reduce muscle activity and allow the tissues to heal. For people (like me) who enter the same type of information or same sentence structure over and over again, it makes writing reports much faster.

Physical Issues:
There are some concerns however. Going back to basic principles... the human body was not designed to do any one task for long periods. We were not designed to sit for long periods, not designed to do hand tasks without breaks and not designed to talk continuously. Workers who continuously use VRT for word and data processing may strain their vocal cords.

Sound is produced by air passing over the vocal cords. The tightness of the cords determines the frequency of vibration of the vocal cords, which our ears (or a microphone) understands as noise. The shape of the mouth and lips and placement / movement of the tongue determine which sound is made.

Unfortunately, air has a drying effect on the vocal cords which can lead to irritation and inflammation. The quality of the air also plays a role. In Alberta, and much of the prairies, where there is minimal moisture in the air, talking continuously can cause irritation to the vocal cords. Most offices do not make any effort to humidify the air system. In Ontario and other humid areas, efforts are made to remove humidity from the air!

Some of the moisture for the throat can come from drinking water. But for people who must talk continuously, a high level of humidity is essential. This can come from local area humidifiers if they are carefully maintained. I recently spoke with an indoor air quality (Occupational Hygiene) consultant who told me about an office with a high rate of respiratory illness. When she investigated, she found numerous "home" humidifiers that were black with mold because everyone expected someone else to maintain them.

If you are using a local area humidifier, caution should be used to ensure that such a device is thoroughly maintained as it can become moldy very quickly. Ideally, such a unit would have no standing water in which microbial growth can occur. Fountains are pleasant but should not be allowed to run dry or be turned off. Small amounts of chlorine can be added to inhibit microbial growth. In terms of domestic table top humidifiers, hot mist or steam vapourizer models are better than cool mist or wicking models. Additional methods of increasing humidity include leafy, non flowering plants and boiling a kettle of fresh water.

Processing Issues:
I use Dragon Naturally Speaking. When I first got my VRT program I loved it. It was quick and easy to install and the initial programming of the vocabulary took only half an hour. Because my office ergonomic reports are quite repetitive in the description of the workplace and tasks involved, the program quickly adopted my phrases and was quite accurate reproducing them in print.

After a while though, it started to understand breathing and other sounds as words, inserting "the" and "a" at random intervals. While it never makes a spelling error, it may use an undesirable homonym - not recognizing the context difference between "there", "their" and "they're" or "to", "too" and "two". If you accidentally miss the correction to the error and save your vocabulary at the end of the session, the program learns that the erroneous word is correct and reproduces it in the future.

As I mentioned before, I tend to say the same thing over and over again in some of my reports. My father, on the other hand, is a writer. Every document he creates is entirely new. He found that VRT could not keep up to him because it did not have repeated phrases to learn.

Overall:
I still use VRT, but only for tasks that are repetitive. I have to periodically wipe out and re-program the vocabulary though so that breathing doesn't result in spontaneous "the" and "a" words. I keep a bottle of water close by and drink continuously.

VRT gives me the luxury of sitting or standing, but I need to keep an eye on the words being produced on the screen. I don't try to make corrections using the program however, I find that is too slow. Making corrections manually also gives my vocal cords a break while not overloading my hands and arms.

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