Voice Recognition Really Works Now

Some time between 8 and 10 years ago, I remember getting voice recognition software with the intent that it would make writing faster.

This was running on a machine with Windows 98 on it — and even with training it didn’t work very well.

I recently saw an iPhone app doing voice dictation and it worked great for recording me without training. It’s amazing how much power new computing devices have (even the tiny ones).

But seeing this video completely blew me away. Not to pick on Tyrone, but his combination of accents (I think it is Australian English combbined with whatever his native asian language is???) makes him difficult for me to understand, yet the software can understand him! That’s amazing! If it can understand him, I’m pretty sure it will be able to understand me.

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Saying Goodbye to Bea Arthur

As my friend Jim used to say (quite often),

If Bea Arthur married Arthur Murray,
she would Bea Arthur Murray.

When prominent celebrities from from childhood die, I often look up with biographies. Maude is one of those shows I sort of remember, though I think it mostly dealt with topics that were of no interest to me. And Golden Girls is a TV show everyone has heard of. So I was kinda surprised to find out that Bea Arthur was actually involved in a Star Wars project.

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