Friday, January 18, 2013

Say That Again?

Despite the advent of things like the Siri program on some iPhones and the thrice-cursed automated call centers that almost every company seems to use, it's actually kind of tough to get a computer to understand the human voice.

Things like background noise, regional accents, words that are homophones and so on can greatly affect whether or not what your computer heard is the same as what you said.

Another problem, not mentioned in the article at the link, is that many times, what I and many people may say to our computers is anatomically and theologically impossible. And let's not get into the computerized voice-recognition menus at places like the phone company -- although it would be correct to say that the program's parents were never married, the reality is that the reason for that statement has less to do with the alleged loose morals of said parents and more to do with the fact that programs don't have parents.

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