Input Devices : Voice Recognition

Voice recognition systems listen to what people are saying and carry out the instructions given to them when people speak. A microphone is used to provide input for a voice recognition system. Currently these systems are not very sophisticated and are used only for certain applications. Existing voice recognition systems come in two different types :

• Systems which recognise only a few words but can understand most peoples voices. e.g. telephone banking computers.
• Systems which recognise a wide vocabulary but need to be trained to understand each different voice. e.g. automatic dictation systems.

In the last few years a number of voice dictation packages have been developed. These packages let the user dictate text into a computer to appear in a word processed document. Dictating like this can be much quicker than typing but the computer still makes some mistakes especially with short words and with words that sound the same but are spelt differently. e.g. there and their.

GCSE ICT Companion 04 - (C) P Meakin 2004