Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Funny, funny speech recognition

Speech recognition (ASR) sometimes completely amazes me.

I work mainly on speech recognition, which I'm not overly fond of, but this morning it's been pretty great. Anyway, I'm sitting here doing a report and my ASR is having trouble picking up simple words such as back pain and keeps wanting to type odd things such as back pen and buck pin, but then I'll be going along and it will spell something hard right which always amazes me. How can it spell back pain wrong but pick up and spell the hard words correctly. Does the doctor pronounce the hard words more clearly?

The real kicker for me is when it will get the simple stuff wrong but spell the patient's name correctly, something like Warren Schraeder it will totally spell correctly. I always have to double check and smile when it gets the patient's odd name correctly or some doctor I've never heard of it spells right. Uhmm...shouldn't it get pain right and Warren Schraeder wrong? No this isn't really the patient's real name, patient confidentiality and all that you know.

Anyway, just something to stop and go hmmmm about.

A note about the picture above... I Googled speech recognition and then hit images and that picture was there. I have no clue why it was under speech recognition, but it made me smile so I added it.

Okay, a second note here. I got curious and went to look at where the picture came from and it's actually from a blog called Speech Recognition, news from a technology that is transforming healthcare practice. Very interesting that the latest post is about the sale of MedQuist to CBay, how funny, such a small blogging world. You can visit the blog here. Glad I went back and checked it out.

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