Experimenting natural-language dictation with a 20000-word speech recognizer

The authors describe a newly developed real-time large-vocabulary speech recognizer for the Italian language and some preliminary experiments on its usage. Some of these experiments are aimed at evaluating voice versus keyboard as a means for entry and editing of texts. The experiments made use of a dictating-machine prototype for the Italian language, which recognizes in real time natural-language sentences built from a 20000-word vocabulary. A voice-activated editor was developed to allow the user to create, revise, file, and print documents. It is found that large-vocabulary speech recognition can offer a very competitive alternative to traditional text entry. It is likely to be well accepted even by users who have a large experience in keyboard text editing. The study has already suggested possible improvements to the man-machine interface of the current speech recognizer.<>