Voicing an opinion

Too Long; Didn't Read

I’ve been writing these articles for about two weeks now. This is the first time I’m using a speech recognition app, an app that allows me to speak directly into the computer without typing at all. I can’t help but thinking that this is a fascinating technology. It gets better and better at such a pace it’s just mind-blowing. I remember the first time I heard a computer talk I was around twelve years old, trying out a new game on my Commodore 64. This was in the late eighties. You didn’t have to install programs or games on the c64 you just loaded each level on your little tape recorder before you played it. After having loaded the tape for a couple of minutes there was an intro to a game called X-Out in which you could hear a robotic voice saying the words “cross out”. Sometime before this I had learned how to program the sound card on the c64, called the SID chip. This early sound card could handle for different channels at a time. Each channel could play a sawtooth-, triangle-, pulse- or noise-wave pattern, one picture at a time. To make it speak was a remarkable thing to accomplish. Voice recognition is harder though. A lot harder. Loads of computation goes into it, probably more than you can imagine. For the computer to understand that there’s a voice speaking and not just some random noise an enormous amount of computation needs to be done. To separate the words, to understand each word, to make sense of sentences.