Minutes of the Speech Understanding Workshop Convened on 13 November 1975 in Washington, D.C

摘要

There are quite a set of advantages for being able to use speech as a means of communication between a man and a machine and this program was launched by the realization at various plants that there is just a tremendous benefit in payoff to get if you could use speech. It's the most effortless encoding of all the output channels that the human has available to him, to say things or to communicate things to other people. It's got a higher data rate than any other channels you can use, it's the preferred one if you are going to generate something spontaneously---doesn't tie up the hands, and one can move around while doing it. It's just a very nice communication media. Humans, of course, for centuries have been tieing themselves to the written record. There are a variety of outward speech of various types and reading out loud is at least twice as fast as the record for typing speed and something like four times as fast as an ordinary skilled typist. It is considerably faster than the average one of us who sits down to a typewriter and tries to get things out. So, if one could understand continuous speech, that would clearly be the preferred mode for an enormous range of situations for a man who is trying to communicate information into a computer. (Author)