- Alexander I. Rudnicky. 1989. Goal-directed Speech in a Spoken Language System. Abstract: The advent of reliable speaker‐independent continuous speech recognition systems has made it possible to design systems that use speech as a replacement for keyboard input. To understand the nature of a system that accepts spontaneous goal‐directed speech (as opposed to the current standard of read speech), a spoken‐language spreadsheet was implemented and users performing a series of tasks using this system were studied. The system was instrumented to allow the collection of detailed timing information about the components of the interaction cycle. The (HMM‐based) recognition system incorporates a lexicon of 273 words and a language of perplexity 51. Four users performed a series of 40 tasks (involving the entry of personal financial information) alternating voice and keyboard input. Users completed 30 tasks in one block of sessions, then returned a month later to complete the remainder. The utterances spoken into the system (over 7500) were stored for later analysis. The data collected provide a compreh...
