Looking for Noisy-environment speech recognition microphone
Please help me find a good noisy-environment speech recognition microphone. I have students that want to use speech-to-text in their classroom, the microphone should pick up the student’s voice but not stray voices in the room. Best if it’s on a headset.
I don’t know how well they work for speech recognition, you’re familiar with my troubles in that field, but Plantronics makes a bunch of loud environment headsets with microphones designed to pickup sound from the wearer instead of, say, an aircraft carrier. They’re not cheap, around $300 a pair, and they’re kind of heavy, but you might be able to pick up just a microphone rather than the entire headset.
Yeah, Plantronics might have a device that would work for this. I’ve been trying to get a reasonable answer from someone there but it seems like I’ve just got to buy one (for $150+) and find out. I’m not doing that.
I got a recommendation from the Read&Write for Google people that iPhone earbuds work well. And yes, they are working better than my “speech recognition” headphones for rejecting the voices of other people in the room. I’ll do some more testing but that might be what I have my students go with.
I found 2 headsets with good noise cancelling microphones!
– Plantronics “Audio 355” https://www.amazon.com/Plantronics-Audio-355-Multimedia-Headset/dp/B001J30FZM
– Logitech USB Headset H390 with Noise Cancelling Mic https://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Headset-H390-Noise-Cancelling/dp/B000UXZQ42
Two folks, Winnie Chen and Laura Lay, the Learning Differences Librarian at San Francisco Public Library have been a great help on this project.
I’ll get back to you about whether these headphones are significantly better than non-noise cancelling mics.