Benefits of Speech Recognition in Daily Life
Speech recognition can make your daily life a bit easier or help you out when your hands are busy. Now that speech recognition is as accessible as reaching into your pocket and greeting Siri or Google, it’s never been easier to build a habit out of improving your life with speech recognition. Let’s explore some of the most beneficial ways to use speech recognition in your daily life and improve your productivity with speech recognition.
Best Uses for Speech Recognition
- Desktop or mobile accessibility
One of the most common uses for speech recognition is to improve accessibility for those with visual or mobility impairments. With smartphones, these accessibility features can come in the form of Google’s Voice Access spoken commands, Apple’s Voice Control commands for iOS, and other similar speech commands for mobile devices. Speech commands allow for users to quickly access specific programs or take certain actions with just a voice command.
Speech recognition software that allows for automation also exists for desktop devices. Fusion Narrate, for example, allows users to create shortcuts to open or interact with any desktop software. Fusion Narrate allows for even more complex voice shortcuts and multi-action voice shortcuts, allowing users to take complete control of what they wish to automate.
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- Use speech recognition as an alternative to typing
Speech recognition, on average, is faster than typing – meaning that it can be used as a replacement for typing in some areas. One area this might help most is in writing emails. Depending on your job or social life, you might receive over 100 emails per day. Sure, not each email requires a response, but for those that do, using speech recognition can be a great way to speed up your process.
On top of being faster than typing, it’s sometimes easier to let your thoughts out vocally rather than typing each word. Plenty of authors use this technique, as recording stream-of-consciousness thoughts is often easier when vocalized than written.
- Planning a to-do-list
As we’ve established, sometimes stream-of-consciousness speaking is the easiest way to jot information down. This can be especially useful when planning a to-do list or filling out your calendar. Next time you have several ideas for what needs to be done spinning around in your head, try opening up a notes app on your phone or a notepad application on your computer and use a speech recognition app to verbalize your thoughts and organize them into a neat digital list.
- Advanced automation
As referenced earlier, speech recognition is most powerful when it is paired with automation. Fusion Narrate offers accurate speech recognition and flexible workflow automation, making it simple to perform everyday actions with just your voice.
Some of the most common automations are opening Outlook to check email or opening other desktop applications. With multi-action shortcuts, a shortcut like ‘Start my day’ is possible, where every application you need to view at the start of your day is opened and logged into. For example, you may want to open your email browser, open a web browser and navigate to a certain page, and open a messaging app like Microsoft Teams. Activating the ‘Start my day’ shortcut would open each application without you ever clicking a button.
Speech has become more integrated in our daily lives as technology becomes more advanced – the accuracy of speech recognition has continually improved, and simple or advanced functions can be performed based on the recognized speech.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is speech recognition an accessibility utility?
Yes, speech recognition can be used as an accessibility utility, and in some cases is even designed to improve accessibility.
- Why is speech recognition challenging on a mobile device?
Although smartphones come pre-packaged with virtual assistants that use speech recognition, that speech recognition is designed for general use and the phone’s default microphone is not designed for dictation. Therefore, misrecognition is more likely with mobile speech recognition – especially for niche or specific terms, such as in medical speech recognition.
