Apple's voice recognition software completely ignores context

By -
I note this because I find it a very curious decision on the part of the engineers who built it.

An example: a minute ago, I just spoke the words "an ant colony." The software inserted the words "an and colony." That does not even make syntactical, let alone semantic sense. But the software did offer me two alternatives: "Aunt" and "an." An "Aunt colony" is an amusing suggestion: I pictured a group of spinsters gathered together on an island, knitting and serving each other tea. But again, "an an colony" makes no sense at all.

Surely, far and away the most common word, which sounds like these choices, to go in the blank in the phrase "an ____ colony" is "ant," right? But that was not even offered as an alternative.

Does anyone know why the designers decided against taking any clues from context in deciding what was spoken?



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more