When does “ergonomics” become “urban comics?” When you let voice recognition software loose on your vocabulary. Voice recognition is either a godsend or a hassle, depending on whom you ask. It can also be a joke. I’ve encounted many interesting tales lately of odd transcriptions authored by various VR packages.
In my opinion, the VR blooper is becoming an art form in its own right. Someone, somewhere ought to run a contest for the best VR blooper. (If such a contest exists already, please let me know about it.)
Susan Fulton’s Computing Out Loud site offers an entertaining VR Goofs page. The examples here demonstrate not just the intriguing and amusing ways that VR packages mistranslate words, but also how they interpret stray sounds. For instance…
Here are a couple of my favorite examples of translated sounds from that page:
“When my landlady walks around upstairs (old wooden house), Dragon Naturally Speaking types “unplugging, unplugging” until I feel like doing just that.”
And…
“My husband was sitting next to me watching me “speak words on the screen.” I think he was getting bored watching, and reached down and goosed me. I let out whatever sound one makes when goosed and Dragon Dictate printed ‘Clinton’ on the screen. (Even back then these things were smarter than you’d think.)”
I was reminded of the rich entertainment potential (and sometimes Zen-like profundity) of voice recognition bloopers when earlier today I read a newsbrief in my very favorite “news source,” the parody newspaper The Onion. (See “Voice Recognition Software Yelled At,” under the “News in Brief” heading, about halfway down the home page.) I was laughing so hard I literally could not finish reading the punchline out loud to my husband, I gave up after five tries. Worth a read.
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