Automatic Speech Recognition Assisting and Enabling Receptive Communication

This paper describes how Automatic Speech Recognition can be used to assist receptive communication and reflects on the opportunities and challenges this technology presents students and staff to provide captioning of speech online or in classrooms for deaf or hard of hearing students and assist blind, visually impaired or dyslexic learners to read and search learning material more readily by augmenting synthetic speech with natural recorded real speech. The automatic provision of online lecture notes synchronised with the speech enables staff and students to focus on learning and teaching issues while also benefiting learners unable to attend the lecture or who find it difficult or impossible to take notes at the same time as listening, watching and thinking.