Solutions for Background Noise

How Much Background Noise Can Speech Recognition Tolerate: Karl answers the question of how much background noise can be tolerated in a school or office setting.

Karl Barksdale

One of the questions we get constantly concerns the physical facilities needed for someone doing speech recognition in a classroom setting or on the job. I am still experimenting myself, but I am continually amazed at how much background noise can be canceled out by today's speech recognition microphones.

My first experience with large amounts of background noise was with ViaVoice in a very loud CompUSA superstore. In the middle of the showroom floor, a Lotus salesperson demonstrated flawlessly on an IBM ThinkPad. Since then, I have dictated for over two years in the middle of my rather noisy classroom, with 30 computers and equal number of students coming and going, talking and working, with amazingly few hiccups. Even our obnoxious intercom announcements don't seem to bother the system all that much.

The key thing is to remember to adjust your audio settings with your average background noise. For example, at home I always adjust my audio settings with the television or radio playing in the background at a reasonable level. This helps the system account for that extra background sound that seems to be consistently present in my house.

The typical office cubicle seems like an ideal speech recognition situation. A cubicle will be 1000 times better than some of the situations I have dictated in. I once dictated in the back seat of our family car on vacation with the air conditioning on, the radio on, and the kids playing. Given this example, speech recognition in cubicles shouldn't be much of a problem for people on the job. I think cubicles will become the ideal solution for the average school speech-recognition lab of the future.

This year we used voice dictation with 14 stations in old wooden "library-cast-off" cubicles with stations as close as two feet from each other. The cubicles worked just fine. We also have 16 stations on tables with four feet of space between workstations stations and no partitions between them. This also worked very well.