Voice input to English text output

✍ Scribed by A.W. Booth; M.S. Barnden

• Book ID: 104139731
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1979
• Weight: 566 KB
• Volume: 11
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0020-7373
• DOI: 10.1016/s0020-7373(79)80024-3

✦ Synopsis

It is reasonably well known that mechanical shorthand machines can be used to record verbatim proceedings of conferences, committees and law courts etc. The American system for achieving this is known as Stenotype and the British system is called Palantype. A system has been developed at Leicester Polytechnic, the input to which is the output from mechanical shorthand machines. The shorthand code is transcribed to produce high quality English text output, as long as the machine operator has not made any mistakes. This paper outlines the system at Leicester and describes more fully the method used to transcribe shorthand code into English text. One application for the system, which is presently being investigated by the B.B.C., is the automatic subtitling of television to benefit the deaf. A shorthand machine operator could record verbatim from the sound track of the film, and the English text be transmitted to the television simultaneously. The transcription process runs at speeds of greater than 250 words per minute and is more than adequate to deal with fast speech and the speediest of shorthand machine operators.