This week, I've spent some time away from APs thinking about how to go about creating my final product for this year. So far, I have decided to go with an audio presentation over a visual one. I feel that adding a visual aspect may not add much to my presentation and I doubt I would even have many more visual aids than what is already in my journal posts or in my SDAs. I have also given some thought as to how I want to start my presentation. As of right now, I feel that telling the story of my mom struggling to use the hands-free calling system in her car seems like the obvious choice. From here I could establish that there is an issue with recognizing spoken names and, hopefully, get my audience to realize that, with technology like Alexa and Siri, they have encountered this problem themselves. My reasoning for this course of action is that I want to establish the "So What?" immediately. If I didn't then I fear that any person listening wouldn't be at all invested or interested in anything else I said. As for my essential question, I feel that mentioning that even the technology made by giant companies like Amazon and Apple struggle acts as a perfect segue to asking the question, "How would one go about making a properly functioning software for recognizing spoken names or proper nouns?" From here I plan on simply giving my answer to this question and explain exactly how I reached my conclusions and developed my final product.
As far as additional research goes, I have kept it largely to a minimum, but I did decide to go back and glance at some of the biological aspects of speech. I had initially begun to research this in the hopes that it would help me classify certain phonemes but ended up not needing it. However, now I decided to go back and take another look at it simply out of curiosity. I recently even watched a video of and MRI of a person talking which allows you to see how complex and fast the process of speaking is. In all honesty though the video was partly horrifying, but also fascinating...but also gross.
A link to the video of the MRI (but you can never unsee it):