Learning Through Multimedia: Automatic Speech Recognition Enhancing
  Accessibility and Interaction 
From: University of Southampton (ECS) - 11/26/2006

Researcher Mike Wald demonstrates the enhancement of learning and teaching
quality via automatic speech recognition (ASR) to access, manage, and
leverage online multimedia content. His presentation shows that ASR
technology can help guarantee that both in-person learning and online
learning is universally accessible via the cost-effective generation of
synchronized and captioned multimedia. According to Wald, this strategy
accommodates preferred learning/teaching approaches, and can help those who
have problems taking notes because of cognitive, sensory, or physical
difficulties. In addition, the approach can aid learners with the management
and mining of online digital multimedia resources, as well as offer automatic
speech captioning to hearing-impaired learners or any others to whom speech
is unavailable, unsuitable, or inaudible. Users with blindness or other
visual impairments can also benefit from the method, which helps them read
and search learning material through the enhancement of synthetic speech with
natural recorded real speech. Furthermore, teachers as well as learners can
improve their spoken communication skills through reflection afforded by ASR.
"Although it can be expected that developments in ASR will continue to
improve accuracy rates, the use of a human intermediary to improve accuracy
through correcting mistakes in real time as they are made by the ASR software
could, where necessary, help compensate for some of ASR's current
limitations," Wald writes. The projection of text onto a large screen has had
some success in classroom situations, but many circumstances call for the
provision of an individual personalized and customizable display. Wald
concludes that the ideal system for digitally recording and replaying
multimedia content would automatically produce a mistake-proof transcript of
spoken language that is synchronized with audio, video, and any graphical
elements, which would be displayed in the most suitable manner on diverse
instruments and with adjustable replay speed; annotation would be provided
via pen or keyboard and mouse, and have synchronicity with the multimedia
content. 

Read the entire article at:
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13212/

Link:
Mike Wald
http://www.liberatedlearning.com/consortium/southampton.html
