Voice Typing: A New Speech Interaction Model for Dictation on Touchscreen Devices

Dictation using speech recognition could potentially serve as an efficient input method for touchscreen devices. However, dictation systems today follow a mentally disruptive speech interaction model: users must first formulate utterances and then produce them, as they would with a voice recorder. Because utterances do not get transcribed until users have finished speaking, the entire output appears and users must break their train of thought to verify and correct it. In this paper, we introduce Voice Typing, a new speech interaction model where users’ utterances are transcribed as they produce them to enable real-time error identification. For fast correction, users leverage a marking menu using touch gestures. Voice Typing aspires to create an experience akin to having a secretary type for you, while you monitor and correct the text. In a user study where participants composed emails using both Voice Typing and traditional dictation, they not only reported lower cognitive demand for Voice Typing but also exhibited 29% relative reduction of user corrections. Overall, they also preferred Voice Typing.