Use of Voice Recognition Equipment with Stenographer Masks.

The purpose of this experiment was to determine if the high accuracy rate of current voice recognitiion systems would be reduced significantly if speakers were required to enter utterances through a mask, as opposed to the boom microphone used with most conventional voice recognition systems. The findings suggest that no significant increase in non-recognitions e.g., errors where the system rejects the input and says, in effect, I dont understand you, say it again is evident while using a mask. Misrecognitions i.e., errors where the system accepts the input but mistakes it for a different input do increase significantly under masked conditions. However, the data also indicate that prior experience with speaking into masks or microphones may be a significant moderator of this relationship subjects that reported having had little or no experience speaking into masks or microphones showed significantly more misrecognition errors than those that reported having some or considerable experience speaking into masks or microphones. Moreover, the data indicate that, when using masks, those subjects that reported having had experience with speaking into masks and microphones e.g., pilots, communicators displayed misrecognition error rates still statistically different from but much more comparable to the error rates displayed by subjects under no-mask conditions.