Thought

A good New York Times article on the foibles of voice recognition.

For example, here is a list of “wordos” that author David Pogue’s software created (some quite funny):

bookmark it -> book market
Motorola -> motor roll a
modem port -> mode import
a procedure -> upper seizure
and then stick it in the mail -> and dense thicket in the mail
movie clips -> move eclipse
I might add -> I my dad
inscrutable -> in screw double
hyphenate -> -8
suffocate -> Suffolk 8
a case we summarily dismissed -> a case we so merrily dismissed
or take a shower -> Ortega shower
the right or left -> the writer left
oxymoron -> ax a moron
ArialPhone guy -> aerial fungi

Still, I can’t help thinking that voice input is inevitable — as are translation errors. I wonder if it is possible that humans will modify pronunciations to accommodate the machines. This would be analogous to Newton failing in writing recognition but the Palm succeeding because it used “Graffiti” a made up alphabet. It was easier for the humans to learn to deal with the ambiguity than the machines.