Evaluation of the usability and usefulness of automatic speech recognition among users in South Africa

Abstract

An automatic speech recognition (ASR) system is a software application which recognizes human speech, processes it as input, and displays a text version of the speech as output or uses the input as commands for another application's usage. ASR can either be speaker-dependent or speaker-independent. A speaker-dependent ASR system required every user to perform training before its usage, while speaker-independent ASR requires no prior training before usage...This study involved the evaluation of commercially available English ASR systems, establishing their usability and usefulness among different language groups in South Africa which use English as a common language. Of particular interest was the effect of African accents on the performance of the ASR systems. ASR technology is widely used and researched in the developed world with reported recognition accuracy of up to 99%. However, English spoken with African accents may have adverse effect on the recognition accuracy...