The design of a user interface management system which provides speech input for text processing

Commercial speech recognition systems are available as 'add-on' units for popular office micro-computers. These systems offer the potential of 'hands-free' operation of conventional electronic office products, such as word processors or spread sheets, by the disabled. This paper describes the prototyping carried out to provide access on this type of system to text processing facilities. Initially a 'transparent' interface to a conventional word processor was produced. As a result of addressing the user performance characteristics of this system, areas for design improvement were identified and specification criteria for the next version of the prototype developed.