Talking to a computer is hard. Large vocabulary automatic speech recognition
(ASR) systems are difficult to use and yet they are used by many
people in their daily work. This thesis addresses the question: How is
ASR used and made usable and useful in the workplace now?
To answer these questions I went into two workplaces where ASR is
currently used and one where ASR could be used in the future. This field
work was done with designing in mind. ASR dictation systems are currently
used in the Australian Public Service (APS) by people who suffer
chronic workplace overuse injuries and in the Hansard department of Parliament
House (Hansard) by un-injured people.
Analysing the experiences of the users in the APS and at Hansard
showed that using an ASR system in the workplace follows a broad trajectory
that ends in the continued effort to maintain its usefulness. The
usefulness of the ASR systems is �performed into existence� by the users
with varying degrees of success. For both the APS and Hansard users,
they use ASR to allow work to be performed; ASR acts to bridge the gap
between otherwise incompatible ways of working.
This thesis also asks: How could ASR be used and made usable and
useful in workplaces in the future? To answer this question, I observed
the work of communicating sentences at the ACT Magistrates Court.
Communicating sentences is a process that is distributed in space and
time throughout the Court and embodied in a set of documents that have
a co-ordinating role. A design for an ASR system that supports the process
of communicating sentences while respecting existing work process
is described.
Moving from field work to design is problematic. This thesis performs
the process of moving from field work to design, as described above, and
reflects the use of various analytic methods used to distill insights from
field work data.
The contributions of this thesis are:
� The pragmatic use of existing social research methods and their antecedents
as a corpus of analyses to inspire new designs;
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� a demonstration of the use of Actor-Network Theory in design both
as critique and as part of a design process;
� empirical field-work evidence of how large vocabulary ASR is used
in the workplace;
� a design showing how ASR could be introduced to the rich, complicated,
environment of the ACT Magistrates Court; and,
� a performance of the process of moving from field work to design.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/219557 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Kraal, Ben James, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. Information Sciences and Engineering |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright Ben James Kraal |
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