by Shia Michele Levitt
Narration:
When I injured my arm recently, my doctor told me about a computer program that could temporarily help me out with typing. I looked into it, and sure enough, I discovered a whole world of what's called Voice Recognition Software.
It seemed simple enough. You wear a headset with adjustable microphone resembling an accessory for someone at a customer service call center. You have to train the software by reading some text, so the computer learns to recognize your voice.
I sat down to train the IBM Via Voice program. But very quickly, it became obvious that this was going to be harder than I thought.
I'd say a sentence and the computer would spit back a wildly different interpretation. Some mistakes were insignificant-- like when my friend received an e-mail inviting her to a pizza march instead of the peace march, or a when a paper I wrote discussed policy changes in cereal, the breakfast food, instead of Syria, the country. Some were more embarrassing, though, like the big grant proposal with a crude reference to female genitalia on the fourth page. My computer became my unruly - or unfocused --personal assistant.
In addition to misinterpreting words, sometimes it would garble entire sentences, rendering my speech slurred and meaningless. I wondered-- did my computer have a learning disability or a drinking problem?
While the human ear can filter out sounds that aren't part of the conversation, my computer seemed to give equal weight to every sound it heard. Sometimes, if I forgot to turn off the microphone, I'd return to my computer an hour later and several paragraphs would have appeared, from my computer trying to dictate my end of a phone conversation, or the roar of a car going by outside.
As an experiment, I made some sounds near my computer microphone while the dictation program was on. First I exhaled into the mic. My computer heard this as:
Computer:
The loan
Narration:
Then, I rubbed the microphone on my sleeve. My computer heard:
Computer:
"And in the in the act of."
Narration:
I said, "That's the sound of rubbing my shirt on the microphone." My computer heard:
Computer:
"sound of jitters for strata to shirt on microphone"
Narration:
I started to wonder whether computers were really the all-powerful problem-solvers as they're made out to be. This software was originally a crutch to help me get through a difficult arm injury. But after a few weeks, I started to feel as if I was saved from my physical injury only to wind up with a severe communication problem.
Despite obstacles, the software did help me to continue working while I recovered. I switched to another program, and slowly, trained my computer to learn new words. As time went on, it's accuracy increased.
But I still believe that if you hear an apocalyptic warning about computers taking over the world-- you should just relax. Let me reassure you—my computer taught me that they have a long way to go.
Host:
Shia Levitt is a graduate student and freelance journalist in New York City.