Multimedia workstations for the office

Human factors research was carried out on the application of speech in three areas of man-computer communication: instruction, voice commands for system control and annotation of documents. As to instruction, learning was found to proceed equally fast with speech and text; a number of s ubjects preferred speech to text. Secondly, in speech-to-text conversion, subjects preferred voice to manual tommancls for layout and typographic control, although text input was slower with voice than with manual commands. Thirdly, voice annotations are more readily made than script annotations, but processing times may be longer for voice than for script annotations. In conclusion, speech is a valuable medium for human-computer interaction, provided the applications are carefully chosen and a proper user interface is made.