Speech Recognition Disaster

I invested a fair amount of time “training” Microsoft’s speech recognition software to translate what I was saying into a microphone onto a page of word processed text. As long as I’m careful when I speak, use a good quality microphone, and have it positioned just right, and all the planets are in alignment, it usually works pretty well. However, you can get some pretty unusual results if you do things like clear your throat or mumble, laugh, curse, or speak in a weird, halting accent. I tried reading Rudyard Kipling’s “Gunga Din” in a ridiculously poor cockney accent and what I got is reproduced verbatim below. It’s actually a pretty vivacious piece of writing and seems to have meaning of its own. If you know the poem well (although I did recite only selected lines, entirely from memory), you can occasionally catch a phrase or two, but on the whole what shows up below is pretty much a creation of Microsoft Office’s sick computer brain. Also, this text your reading now was also produced with the speech recognition software and only had to be cleaned up for about 2 minutes longer than it took to speak it.

So without further delay, ladies and gentlemen, excerpts from a dramatic reading of “Gunga Din” as told to Microsoft Office Speech Recognition:

You may call a tin NBA unequal was safe area and sent to pay for its in warden
Schulte it the when it comes to see that said you do you all would “and you take
the demand beats it means his goal at that inches Sunday Tom well all used to
spend the time a seven of a mad Steve McQueen of all that that face cramp the
finest men on nail was all regimental beastie gloom to Dean it was deemed didn’t
didn’t you even with a devotee of been you get mana wall to put some join CNN
all merrihew this minute if you didn’t fizzle on it going again all seem that to
owned in the base ways clone way it’s always Bobo drew a new column teen of the
squad on the kells didn’t drink the called themselves us well get this week it
as from: good demand tin tin tan they’ll walk barricades human flights you
bought from different gold that’s major you open a man and Aryan: the DN.

Some of this shit is downright artistic: “spend the time of a seven of a mad Steve McQueen” and “owned in the base ways clone way it’s always Bobo” are phrases of epic poetry that will withstand the test of time. I don’t care how many monkeys you have typing for an eternity, they couldn’t have produced this.