The purpose of this research was to investigate the effectiveness of using verbal shadowing as a method of enrolling in a speech recognition system. Verbal shadowing refers to a task whereby a person, while listening to a continuous message, repeats the message aloud word for word. Typically the enrollment process involves users reading an enrollment script aloud and the system processes the speech output to create a personalized acoustic model which increases recognition accuracy. Exploring the feasibility of a non-visually based enrollment technique addresses important human factors issues – accessibility by users with visual impairments or educational limitations. This study found that read enrollments reduced mean recognition errors by 24.70% and shadowed enrollments reduced recognition errors by a mean of 24.64% - a difference of only 0.06%. While this was statistically significantly different, for all practical purposes, shadowing as a method of enrollment proved to be as effective as reading.
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