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From: SMT@CORNELLC.cit.cornell.edu (Mike Oltz)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: Re: Live Captioning
Message-ID: <15116@bunker.UUCP>
Date: 24 Oct 90 03:25:20 GMT
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Reply-To: SMT@CORNELLC.cit.cornell.edu (Mike Oltz)
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Fidonet: Silent Talk Conference

Index Number: 11239

I was present at Jimmy Carter's talk at EDUCOM '90.  I would be
surprised if voice recognition was used for that.  I assumed that
there was someone operating a court recorder machine connected to
a computer.  A court recorder machine is a black box with some
buttons on it similar to a Perkins brailler.  Each combination of
buttons stands for a particular syllable.  Usually, this gadget
prints out in a somewhat encoded form on adding-machine tape.
It is used in court because it is absolutely silent, and because
with an experienced operator it can keep up with a normal rate
of speech.  Next time you or a friend watch a news report of a
court case, occasionally the court recorder will show up.

Some companies have automatic telephone answering equipment that
responds to touch-tone codes.  In some cases, where the topic is
sufficiently specific, you can spell out a word simply by pushing
the touch-tone buttons with the appropriate letters on them, and
the computer will guess what word you mean by looking it up in a
table.  If it is confused, it will ask you which of several choices
you really meant.  This kind of lookup could be done quite easily
with court recorder output.  However, in live captioning, you cannot
back up to fix mistakes.  'Pun' type errors would be expected.

The kinds of errors seen in the open captioning, combined with
the obvious human interpretation at times (neither the human nor
the computer had ever heard of 'Zambia') are just what one would
see with a court recorder and computer lookup combined.  At least,
that is my hypothesis.

The open captioning equipment was borrowed from channel 11, Atlanta.
Therefore, it was not surprising that the computer was familiar with
vocabulary Jimmy Carter would use.  'Rosalynn' was no problem.
---
Mike Oltz, Interactive Multimedia Group, Cornell University
myk@cornella.bitnet