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Hi - I'm Ken Gan, President and owner of Interpretype Communications.
I'm here today to show you how speech recognition can be used in the classroom.
What I have set up here is four different Interpretype computers
all connected through a wireless network.
We are not connected to the internet,
we are just generating a wireless signal
for all of them to connect to.
You can also connect with Bluetooth,
but that limits the number of computers in a conversation to two.
With wireless you can have over 100 users in one conversation if desired.
I am also using a Plantronics wireless USB headset and Dragon Naturally speaking software
in conjunction with the Interpretype software.
As you can see,
everything I say is being streamed to the computer my microphone is connected to,
to the large screen in the room, and to all other connected Interpretype computers.
This allows each student in the classroom
to see everything the teacher says as the lecture progresses.
I am proud to announce that the latest release of Interpretype
has something called lecture automation mode.
This allows everything I say to be streamed into the conversation automatically
without having to press the enter key
to inject whatever is in the text entry window into the conversation.
Now you may wonder what happens when mistakes occur, which they will from time to time,
but all this conversation can be saved and printed or edited at a later time.
If the students in the classroom don't understand something that was said
they can easily raise their hand and ask a question.
What is nice about captioning like this is that if the student has a question
they can type it on their own computer and it will be shown in the conversation.
Let's assume one of the students has a question.
All they need to do is type it in their computer and press enter
and their question will be injected into the conversation.
So, if Mary types a question and presses enter
[Mary's question will be visible in the text on the large screen]
She asked "did I have to train my voice to use this?".
The answer is yes - when I first loaded Dragon
I spent about 20 minutes training my voice by reading the necessary paragraphs.
There may be a few words that it does not get
and you can teach it to recognize those words.
For instance, I had to teach it the word Interpretype.
Some of the benefits of using this system are that there are no third party captionists
occupying the classroom and costing money.
If you are using a remote captionist you need an internet connection
and will have to pay for that remote captionist.
That is not necessary when using Interpretype. All this is being done in one room.
What is really nice is that the participants can interact with the lecturer
and the responses are included in the dialog.
In addition, other hearing participants can view in text what was being said,
and if they were distracted for a moment and missed something
they can go back to the screen and see everything that was said.
The entire dialog can also be saved, printed or edited
and distributed to the class or posted to a web site.
As you can see, speech recognition is not perfect
and there may be mistakes from time to time.
But it is very easy for a student to raise a hand
and ask for clarification from the teacher, then have the lecture continue.
The teacher may notice some giggles in the classroom, and that may be a sure sign
that something went wrong with the speech recognition.
As long as the teacher is cognizant and careful, most of these mistakes
can be averted or corrected.
Now, more than one person can use speech recgonition on a computer.
You can set up profiles for different teachers.
This enables the student to bring the computer and headset from classroom to classroom,
then change the speech profile so the speech recognition accuracy remains intact.
And, the lecture automation feature we are demonstrating today
is included with all Interpretype software. There are no additional modules to buy.
All you need to make this work is a quality USB wireless microphone
and speech recognition software installed on the computer with the Interpretype software.
Thank you.