Speech recognition has been advancing rapidly in recent years, and is increasingly used in the captioning of live TV programs. At the moment, captioners must ‘re-speak’ the dialogue, which is then converted to captions. iMiracle, one of the applications being developed by AT&T Labs, will automatically transcribe the speech on live TV, and translate it into different languages.
Other applications which are still at the development stage include iWalk, a phone app which will provide directions and verbal feedback for vision impaired people who cannot read street signs, and iRemote, an app which can search through archived TV programs (stored on your digital video recorder, for example) and use speech recognition to find specific segments.
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