What is voice recognition, and why is it useful in a virtual environment?
Voice recognition is “the technology by which sounds, words or phrases spoken by humans are converted into electrical signals, and these signals are transformed into coding patterns to which meaning has been assigned” [ADA90]. While the concept could more generally be called “sound recognition”, we focus here on the human voice because we most often and most naturally use our voices to communicate our ideas to others in our immediate surroundings. In the context of a virtual environment, the user would presumably gain the greatest feeling of immersion, or being part of the simulation, if they could use their most common form of communication, the voice. The difficulty in using voice as an input to a computer simulation lies in the fundamental differences between human speech and the more traditional forms of computer input. While computer programs are commonly designed to produce a precise and well-defined response upon receiving the proper (and equally precise) input, the human voice
