Crowdsourcing at the Speed of Speech

Computer scientist Jeffrey Bigham has created a speech-recognition program that combines the best talents of machines and people. Though voice recognition programs like Apple's Siri and Nuance's Dragon are quite good at hearing familiar voices and clearly dictated words, the technology still can't reliably caption events that present new speakers, accents, phrases, and background noises. People are pretty good at understanding words in such situations, but most of us aren't fast enough to transcribe the text in real time (that's why professional stenographers can charge more than $100 an hour). This rapid-fire crowd-computing experiment could be a big help for deaf and hearing-impaired people. It also could also provide new ways to enhance voice recognition applications like Siri in areas where they struggle. Scribe's algorithms direct human workers to type out fragments of what they hear in a speech.