According to the Times, voice recognition is the next frontier in technology. As a five-year veteran of voice rec software, I’m extremely skeptical.
Steve Lohr and John Markoff write that voice recognition technology — already in use everywhere from cars to phone-based customer service systems — could one day replace receptionists or even medical assistants. Despite their claim that the technology is about to revolutionize society — they write, “the prospect, according to scientists and economists, is not only that artificial intelligence will transform the way humans and machines communicate and collaborate, but will also eliminate millions of jobs, create many others and change the nature of work and daily routines” — their article reads like a compendium of silly voice rec gaffes. There’s the misogynist medical transcription software: says one doctor, “It’s unbelievably better than it was five years ago. But it struggles with ‘she’ and ‘he,’ for some reason. When I say ‘she,’ it writes ‘he.’ The technology is sexist.” There’s the automated Arabic-to-English translator used in Iraq:
When a soldier asked a civilian, “What are you transporting in your truck?” the Arabic reply was that the truck was “carrying tomatoes.” But the English translation became “pregnant tomatoes.”
Then there’s an MTV producer’s experience with a “virtual personal assistant” called Siri:
Recently, he asked Siri for the location of a sushi restaurant he knew. Siri replied with directions to an Asian escort service. “I swear that’s not what I was looking for,” he said.
I’ve been there. I’ve used voice recognition software (currently Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9, if you care) for five years due to wrist problems. The he-she problem is constant, but probably Dragon’s most egregious screwup was in graduate school, when I tried to dictate the sentence, “That was a great story!” in a letter to a classmate. Dragon has never liked exclamation points — it rendered the sentence as, “that was a great story Asian porn.”