A WWW browser using speech recognition and its evaluation
Kazuhiro Kondo, Charles T. Hemphill · Systems and Computers in Japan · 1998
We developed the Japanese speech-aware multimedia (JAM) that controls a world wide web (WWW) browser using speech. This system allows the user to browse a linked page by reading the anchor text within a web page. The user can also control the browser using speech. The system integrates new vocabulary each time a new web page is read by extracting the anchor text, converting this text to phonetic string notation, creating a new speech recognition grammar, and integrating this grammar with the system dynamically. During this anchor text-to-phone conversion process, we employ numerous exception handling techniques to accommodate counters, dates, and many other phenomena. Preliminary tests show that the conversion results contain the correct phone sequences over 97% of the time. We also allowed limited English speech recognition since a large percentage of the Japanese web pages include some English text in anchors. User tests showed that the prototype correctly understands input speech 91.5% of the time, or 94.1% if we exclude user errors caused by unfamiliarity with the system, including erroneous readings or speech detection errors. © 1998 Scripta Technica, Syst Comp Jpn, 29(10): 57–67, 1998