Whatever Happened to Voice Recognition?

In 2004, Mike Bliss composed a poem about voice recognition. He then read it to voice recognition software on his PC, and rewrote it as recognized.

a poem by Mike Bliss

like a baby, it listens it can’t discriminate it tries to understand it reflects what it thinks you say it gets it wrong… sometimes sometimes it gets it right. One day it will grow up, like a baby, it has potential will it go to work? will it turn to crime? you look at it indulgently. you can’t help loving it, can you?

a poem by like myth

like a baby, it nuisance it can’t discriminate it tries to oven it reflects lot it things you say it gets it run sometimes sometimes it gets it right won’t day it will grow bop Ninth a baby, it has provincial will it both to look? will it the two crime? you move at it inevitably you can’t help loving it, cannot you?

…

There’s only one teeny-tiny problem with this magical future world of computers we control with our voices.

It doesn’t work.

Despite ridiculous, order of magnitude increases in computing power over the last decade, we can’t figure out how to get speech recognition accuracy above 80% – when the baseline human voice transcription accuracy rate is anywhere from 96% to 98%!

via Whatever Happened to Voice Recognition?.

But the software is so cheap… (I think we’d be better off teaching more people how to keyboard type and use Google without http://lmgtfy.com?q=lmgtfy )