Articles

Neil Armstrong’s famous words misinterpretation highlights importance of speech intelligibility in video conferencing

How many people are missing out on key bits of information in daily communication? We thought we heard Neil Armstrong’s famous words “one small step for man” where as Neil is adamant he said, “one small step for A man”.  Poor intelligibly is how problems begin in video conferencing situations. Key bits of information just like Neil’s “a” can lead to misunderstandings, especially as visual body language queues are often not present.  If the actual intelligibility of the voice transmission path from the moon had been better, this conundrum might not have occurred.  Further reading see “Revisiting Neil Armstrong’s Moon-Landing Implications for speech perception function word reduction and Acoustic Ambiguity”

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0155975