Evaluation of Speech Recognizers for Use in Advanced Combat Helicopter Crew Station Research and Development

Abstract : The U.S. Army Crew Station Research and Development Facility uses vintage 1984 speech recognizers. An evaluation was performed of newer off-the- shelf speech recognition devices to determine whether newer technology performance and capabilities are substantially better than that of the Army's current speech recognizers. The Phonetic Discrimination (PD-100) Test was used to compare recognizer performance in two ambient noise conditions: quiet office and helicopter noise. Test tokens were spoken by males and females and in isolated-word and connected-word mode. Better overall recognition accuracy was obtained from the newer recognizers. The report lists recognizer capabilities needed to support the development of human factors design requirements for speech command systems in advanced combat helicopters.