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