Some Speech Sounds

Posted by Glenn Jackson at Monday, October 3, 2011 1:22:25 AM EDT

I have been testing my skills of patient repetition of correlated terms by using some new programs. Today my speech recognition software, called Windows Speech Recognition, has produced the following nuggets of offal:

Product
|Target
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Awful
| offal

Intern
| in turn

Machiavellia / Machiavellian
| Machiavelli (now really, am I more
| likely to say Machiavellia?
| While we’re at it, how about
| Machiavelliana, his memorabilia?

Makaveli
| Speech recognition surveyed my
| student’s essay, which was drawing
| A direct comparison to the rapper
| who, by the way, will reenter
| society in 2014 at age 42, as did
| Niccolò Machiavelli at age 42. Time
| will tell.
| After much battling, his new name is
| “Press capital N Press capital M.”

Up up up up up
| Nothing. I was adjusting tilting the
|microphone boom.

Th th th th I am please th th
|I am so pleased [that] my beard is
| rubbing the microphone.

If if if if th this if
| Not sure. Also interprets sneezing
| as “if,” but I was not sneezing.
| Styrofoam from a take-out box was
| rattling, however.

And
|“Umm…”

Inside / Insight
| Incite

You should putter , softer
| You should put a comma after (this
| is fixed by saying “literal” or by
| using a more obvious construction
| like “a comma.”

Last one:
What you say at the end of your third paragraph really reminds me of Cicero, and those lists where he tells us that we should choose between doing and suffering injustice. Up to the war be a issue of all the fees are still worth the malls and your ear [….]
| The first sentence was rather
| correct, but then my phone rang, I
| pulled off the headset, and it
| picked up approximations of words
| at a distance.

Particularly irritating is the fact that there is no way to say “save file” in recent versions of MS Word, which firm also designed this voice recognition software.

It’s amazing, though, that I can hold a student paper in my hand, barely even look at the computer, and speak as if I were holding a one-sided paper conference, then look back to find five hundred words of terminal comments which are quite concise, conversational, and personal. Please note that the more the user talks and correct, the more it improves the transcription, so these errors will mostly disappear.