Intelligently Aiding Human-Guided Correction of Speech Recognition

Correcting recognition errors is often necessary in a speech interface. The process of correcting errors can not only reduce users’ performance, but can also lead to frustration. While making fewer recognition errors is undoubtedly helpful, facilities for supporting userguided correction are also critical. We explore how to better support user corrections using Parakeet – a continuous speech recognition system for text entry. Parakeet’s interface is designed for easy error correction on a mobile touch-screen device. Users correct errors by selecting alternative words from a word confusion network and by typing on a predictive software keyboard. Our interface design was guided by computational experiments and used a variety of information sources to aid the correction process. In user studies, participants were able to write text efficiently despite sometimes high initial recognition error rates. Using Parakeet as an example, we discuss principles we found were important for building an effective speech correction interface.