What’s in a name?

Names are very personal, they are our identity and miss-spelt names can often offend people. Even for humans, names are hard to get right in written form, because one pronunciation can result in multiple different ways to spell the name.

How do people get it right?

For example, if you are in a meeting and you are taking notes and there is someone called Niamh present, how would you write that? Is it Niamh, Neve, Nieve, Neave or Neeve? Now, if you have some context it can really help. If you were a human you might look at the list of attendees in the meeting to check the spelling and make sure you did not get it wrong.

Can Speech Recognition do that too?

The Custom Dictionary feature in Speechmatics ASR products can help solve this issue like a human would. Just adding the name to the Custom Dictionary feature often works without needing to provide any pronunciation hints. For example, adding 'Jon' will help make sure that it is not transcribed as 'John'. However, that will not work for all cases such as the one in the original example above. But all is not lost, Speechmatics can help you here too.

Watch this space for our newest feature addition, coming soon…

Watch the example below!

Ian Firth, Speechmatics