055: What’ll be the Impacts of Perfect Speech Recognition?

In this week's episode, we consider the rapid progress and recent impressive demos in the realm of speech recognition technology. We consider the difference between transcribing and understanding language, and work out a thought experiment of what might change when full transcription is widely and cheaply available. We talk about the challenges facing current generation technologies and speculate which are likely to be improved soon and which are sticky. We wonder whether even machine-readable transcription might be enough to help search engines do things like jump you directly to a movie quote's location in a film, or to help YouTube and Facebook mine your private videos for marketing purposes. We also cover the effects on lifelogging, surveillance, interface design -- and of course, jobs. At the end of the episode, we debut a new listener mailbag feature and respond to your comments.

Om Podcasten

Enter a simulated universe where software beings engage in classic human struggles for belonging, status, and attention, and old certainties like death and gravity are just settings to be negotiated. You can be the god of your own private world, but if find yourself feeling lonely, you might be tempted to give away some of your precious control. This podcast will take you behind the scenes with comic book authors and veteran podcasters Jon Perry (@perryjon) and Ted Kupper (@tedkupper) as they write and develop a science fiction graphic novel called Constellation, set in a metaverse unlike any you’ve seen before: neither a utopia nor a dystopia, neither real nor virtual, it is a simulation where everyone knows they are being simulated and no one much cares, where there’s no hope of leaving and no reason to, just an endless supply of human-designed worlds to create and explore.