We?re talking to more robots?but the technology leaves behind people with speech differences When Apple released Siri in 2011, Marc Winski was excited. Here was a new way to play songs, make phone calls, and save time. All one needed to do was say the magic words: ?Hey Siri, do this...? Winski didn?t expect his stutter to defeat the time-saving purpose of this technology. But it did.
?As soon as you pause or stop over a word, [Siri] stops listening,? said Winski, an actor living in Manhattan. ?Something that was created to save time has created more stress.?
While these interactions are frustrating for Winski and the roughly 3 million people in the United States who stutter, voice assistants and voice recognition technology are here to stay. Whether it?s relaying your name to a non-human operator or telling Google to turn up the lights in your home, we?re talking to more robots?but the technology is leaving people who stutter behind. Speech-recognition software does not always parse stuttered speech, because it has not yet been trained to account for the extra sounds created when someone stutters. According to Frank Rudzicz, a University of Toronto computer scientist who studies speech technology for people with speech disabilities, any given voice assistant is making observations about your speech upward of 16,000 times a second, looking for phonemes, or the sounds that, when combined, create words.
Phonemes help computers?and our brains?differentiate between wor...