[senco-forum] re: Voice Recognition software

Hi to all,

Trying again.  Our system reverts to rich text for each new email and I
didn't notice so my last attempt at this message didn't get posted.

I have been 'lurking' for a while and reading comments since joining the
forum.  Sorry this is so long for a first post!

Some of you will know me through mentoring for SEMERC in the teacher IT
initiative, later as a CAP assessor, but for those who don't my background
is teaching children with special needs for just under thirty years - first
in special schools, then as an outreach teacher with an interest in general
and specific learning difficulties and ICT.  Now I work as a consultant
teacher with a local authority Inclusion Support Service and specialise in
ICT solutions for students with SEN.

I was interested to read the request for information regarding voice to
text software.  I always treat this as a potential solution only after all
other avenues have been explored for a school aged child particularly in KS
1- 3.   Scotopic sensitivity (Erlen) and visual stress screening, fine
tuning of the basic wor-processor template, predicitive text (Penfriend -
the new version XL meshes automatically with clicker 5), and auditory
feedback being among major areas for exploration.

Among my reasons for caution with voice to text, are:
that the school environment is rarely conducive to accurate voice
recognition and I have had experience of a number for whom voice
recognition seemed to be the only solution only to have them give up in
frustration;
a child in year 7 will rarely have a mature adult voice and 'training'
becomes a real issue - accuracy dropped to under 50% for one student as his
voice 'broke' over years seven and eight.  Constant retraining became a
burden especially as health issues meant he also had a series of severe
colds during this time;
Until recently laptops have not been the best vehicle for running the
software because of the configuration of the mainboard with soundcard close
to the cooling system - unless you use a modern laptop with self-cooling
chip (and not a cooling fan) plus a noise reducing microphone this could be
a major issue.  PC's are  not such a problem - but are hardly inclusive as
they can't be accessible in the same way as a laptop - I did find that for
one child using a PC, a separate hard drive for the software and voice
files was necessary due to conflicts with other 'voice' software that he
needed;
many youngsters have additional needs which impact on the accuracy of the
'recognition' which occurs;
I found that 'proof reading' was generally among the poorest developed
skills for a dyslexic child, and that because the voice software was always
checking against a dictionary of real words the Microsoft spell-checker
only underlines words with "a green wiggly line" not the red one that
children recognise as indicating a miss-spelling.  "If the computer has
done it then surely it's right" was a response I have had.

Finally, other software allows the continued exploration and learning of
the key skills while giving support in a variety of areas.  For example
Co-writer and Penfriend mentioned in another reply both use specially
constructed lexicons (rather than the standard dictionary) which compare
possible phonetic attempts, rules of grammar and frequency of word use to
make their predictions; my own daughter used to spell castle as casul - MS
dictionary gave Kabul, casual and causal as possible corrections while
Co-writer suggested castle among the top ten suggestions.

Newer versions of 'Word' allow the exploration of basic voice recognition
while XP as an operating system also allows fine tuning of a computer for
an individual's needs.  This is the link to MS Office Online help about
speech to text:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/word/HP030843991033.aspx

There are a range of free or cheap solutions that can be experimented with
listed by AbilityNet at:  http://www.abilitynet.org.uk/edu_shareware

QSpeak (from Quillsoft) was recommended to me by some other professionals
as very suitable for education purposesm and I discovered yesterday that
there is a downloadable free thirty day trial of SpeakQ from Quillsoft at:
http://www.wordq.com/

Jeremy Beckett
SEN ICT Consultant Teacher
Inclusion Support Service
Nottinghamshire LA0115 963 4895

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