Forget Typos, Watch Your Speakos
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Move over, small world, it’s a sound world after all. You might be surprised to see (or perhaps to hear) how much speech technology is impacting your own personal world, as compared with say 12 months ago. Clearly, this is not a silent revolution, but you could be forgiven if you had not spotted the changes. Sound is really the killer app. .. and that’s before we hear the impact of the major initiatives that Microsoft and Google have in hand.
Some things are almost imperceptible. Six months ago, you would call your telecom supplier and were frustrated by the experience. You wanted to press zero just to cut through the electronic thicket and get someone who could understand you. If you had an accent, it was even tougher. Call today and in many cases your virtual assistant will do as well as a skilled and well-trained agent could ever have done.
Of course voice to voice is not too difficult. Human beings sometimes have difficulty talking to each other, so we are somewhat forgiving. The much greater challenge is voice to text. Indeed, many readers are sticklers about fine points of grammar and typos. Luckily, most document software has spell checkers. That means that the worst mistakes (typos) can be caught.
This post is being written using Dragon Naturally Speaking software. By now I have trained it reasonably well so it requires few corrections, even with only a modest microphone. This is a growing trend, as you can see by checking on other blog posts. The one that triggered my writing this post read as follows:
If you have cash higher personalities and market leaders for brand association and exposure.
Clearly the author meant to say:
If you have cash, hire personalities and market leaders for brand association and exposure.
Then this morning, a much more visible example showed up on that excellent blog by Andy Nulman. The title read as follows, Changing The World Once Cellphone at a Time. That clearly is an example of a speako.
Some like Eric Bakovic or Adam Albright question whether that is the best term. Would talko or mistalk be better? Well my vote is for speako. The problem is that, since the computer made the speako and it is not mis-spelled, a spell checker does not spot any mistake.
It’s a fascinating subject. There is a discussion at Cre8asite Forums on this if you’re interested. That even branches into the subject of your blog talking back to you. Check out A.L.I.C.E or PandoraBots if you’d like to see where this is all heading.
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