Egan explains that the system will ask an individual, for example, to land an aircraft. The private sector can disseminate the technology throughout the education system, Egan adds. Government, industry and academia already are teaming to exploit the instructional aspects of the system. Cook notes that various government agencies have substantial needs to translate foreign speech. Egan suggests that video retrieval also can be enhanced by the new speech recognition technology.
Images are difficult to classify, but virtually all videos include speech.
The recognition program could be applied to tag the video, and topic spotting also could serve to filter long video files such as multiple newscasts. Special operations forces equipped with wearable computers could use the system to communicate with residents of a foreign country as they encounter them in the field. Cook notes that this would tend to be a limited domain because of portability. The technology also can help quadriplegic spinal cord injury victims control wheelchairs or, eventually, computers. Cook describes how a disabled user could generate a word processing document at the speed of speech, instead of using a mouth-controlled wand to press keys individually.