What It Does For You »

SSR integrates speech recognition and word prediction into a single software program so that you don't have to type so many letters when writing. What makes SSR unique is that it works with difficult to understand speech (often called "dysarthric" speech). Dysarthric speech is usually not consistent enough, nor does it have enough differentiation among spoken words to perform speech recognition on large vocabularies without help. The speech recognizer in SSR is specifically designed to work with this type of speech. We have spent several years developing SSR and received research funding from the National Institutes of Health to make this technology "real". If your speech is hard to understand but it would be helpful to use it for writing, SSR is for you!

SSR uses the first letter of a word to significantly reduce the number of words possible at a given location in a sentence. This makes it easier to perform speech recognition and also enables a larger overall speech recognition vocabulary.

Requiring the first letter has benefits to the user:

  • It provides a clear cue for when to speak (e.g. shortly after typing the first letter), making respiratory planning easier for people with severe disability.
  • It reduces co-articulation among words, making speech easier to understand.

The disadvantage to requiring the fist letter is that typing with SSR is slower than commercial speech recognition software, such as Dragon Naturally Speaking.

SSR learns new words as you say them, so it becomes fine-tuned to the way that you write and the way that you speak. Over time, the system learns the words you use and significantly reduces the amount of typing that you have to do.

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Questions? Contact us.