Prof. Hawking Reads Business Week?

Here is a rather nice example of how the increasing degree of interactivity on the web makes rather boring redundant content a bit more interesting. In this recent Business Week technology column on speech recognition, the author regurgitates the same technology summary/predictions journalists have been writing for at least a decade now. The reader comments go on to add more interesting content/analysis than the original article itself. For example, if you think the guy in the cube next door who is constantly on a conference call annoys you, just wait until you hear the dull roar in the cubicles that is enabled when speech recognition gets as good as folks are predicting it will! Hopefully by then all of us technologists will be telecommuting!

One of the more interesting comments is supposedly supplied by Prof. Hawking's himself. Not sure if that's the case, but the point made (conventional ASR does a pretty good job of recognizing conventional TTS) is actually something I've confirmed independently. Unlike Hawking's, the typical use case for most of us is to automate testing of speech systems/applications.

Read the article.