Advocates Raise Concerns About Automatic Speech Recognition in IP CTS

A coalition of consumer advocacy and research organizations responding to Nagish's application for certification raised concerns about the FCC's approval process for applications to provide IP captioned telephone services using automatic speech recognition only. The Telecommunications for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Inc., Hearing Loss Association of America, National Association of the Deaf and Gallaudet University's Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Technology for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing said they were concerned about the FCC reviewing applications "without first creating technology-neutral minimum standards" or making enough information publicly available, per an ex parte filing Tuesday in docket 03-123. The groups said "little progress has been made on these issues as the urgency to address them has increased over the past three years" and questioned the "quality, privacy, and other tradeoffs involved in using ASR." Nagish's application, "though commendable in parts, follows other applications in seeking to bypass many of the existing requirements intended to ensure the quality of human-captioner-based IP CTS," the groups said, adding the FCC should "focus on in-call switching functionality."