Sunday, December 16, 2007

Tip of the tongue phenomenon

Feature idea - what if Calico used speech recognition to map words that were said while something was being drawn? It wouldn't have to be accurate in the least. If only a few words can be captured, it would key people in to what was being discussed. For example, after a discussion is done, you could use a lasso that would circle a set of figures, and a list of words that were mentioned while those were being drawn appeared in a transient floating box. It wouldn't necessarily be sentences, just key words. The speech recognition software could have a high error rate, even 50 percent miss, but it would still be extremely useful. It would need to be calibrated, test if the gap would need to be only while it's being drawn, or if it needs everything said 1 minute before and after. It could also be calibrated to pick out "important" words, or all words. This could be done retroactively by assigning a time stamp to all drawn objects, and a time stamp to all words recorded, then map them to each other afterwards.

What makes this useful and possible is the tip of the tongue phenomenon. People are much better at recognition than they are at recall. While reviewing a session, the words would be similar enough that they would instigate a recognition of events. A psych study was done on tip of the tongue events, and people recited items which were either close phonetically or semantically. So, even if the voice recognition software completely butchered the word, it would be close enough that it clue the reviewer to an idea that was at the tip of their tongue.

I would like to perform a study eventually using Calico and this concept. The study would involve two sessions, one session using the board, and one session a few days later that reviewed the first session to allow an incubation process for ideas. The latter test would involve questions reviewing the first drawing session, having them look at key words, and measure how many new ideas are spawned by looking at the old. Also, a search feature would send the user to elements drawn that included that key word.

I don't want to develop this feature myself, but if another person joins the team, I'd like have them work on this.

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