The u.S. Army engineers ohio river division (ord) has incorporated a personal computer (pc)-based voice-recognition system for data acquisition in its geotechnical engineering laboratory. These systems recognize spoken commands as an alternative to keyboard input, which can be a major benefit considering the poor keyboard environment found in many geotechnical engineering laboratories. Voice-recognition systems have several useful implementations for control of simpletests in a production geotechnical engineering laboratory, one of the simplest being atterberg limit determination. A system developed at the ord laboratory for this purpose consists of an ibm voice-recognition system installed in a zenith z-248 pc. This system is coupled with a mettler pe-3600 balance having an rs-232 output. The balance is triggered to make a reading by a digital signal produced by theparallel printer port. A computer program has been written to allowhands-off operation for atterberg limit data acquisition and reduction. The type of system described does not remove the physical effort involved in conducting the test, but removes the need for data sheets and lessens the chance of calculation errors. Voice-recognition systems are being implemented at the ord lab for visual classification tests. This paper appears in transportation research record no. 1309, Geotechnical engineering 1991.
Abstract