The Golden Age of Dictation

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Computers may have seemed magical to you once, portals to an unpredictable expanse of knowledge and entertainment. Then they became ubiquitous, perhaps a little boring, and occasionally horrifying. Artificial intelligence, though laced with plenty of its own troubles, has managed to rekindle some of the excitement that has been absent from digital technology in recent years—and not just in its highest-profile applications.

Take dictation, for example. As my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote in a recent article, AI has recently enabled drastic improvements in voice recognition, advancing a technology that researchers have historically struggled with. “For a long time, we were making gradual, incremental progress, and then suddenly things started to get better much faster,” Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told her.

Try activating your phone’s dictation feature and speaking your next message instead of typing it. You might just pick up a helpful new habit—and you’d have AI to thank.

— Damon Beres, senior editor

You Don’t Have to Type Anymore

By Caroline Mimbs Nyce

As a little girl, I often found myself in my family’s basement, doing battle with a dragon. I wasn’t gaming or playing pretend: My dragon was a piece of enterprise voice-dictation software called Dragon Naturally Speaking, launched in 1997 (and purchased by my dad, an early adopter).

As a kid, I was enchanted by the idea of a computer that could type for you. The premise was simple: Wear a headset, pull up the software, and speak. Your words would fill a document on-screen without your hands having to bear the indignity of actually typing. But no matter how much I tried to enunciate, no matter how slowly I spoke, the program simply did not register my tiny, high-pitched voice. The page would stay mostly blank, occasionally transcribing the wrong words. Eventually, I’d get frustrated, give up, and go play with something else.

Much has changed in the intervening decades. Voice recognition—the computer-science term for the ability of a machine to accurately transcribe what is being said—is improving rapidly thanks in part to recent advances in AI. Today, I’m a voice-texting wizard, often dictating obnoxiously long paragraphs on my iPhone to friends and family while walking my dog or driving. I find myself speaking into my phone’s text box all the time now, simply because I feel like it. Apple updated its dictation software last year, and it’s great. So are many other programs. The dream of accurate speech-to-text—long held not just in my parents’ basement but by people all over the world—is coming together. The dragon has nearly been slain.

Read the full article.

What to Read Next

• Why a cognitive scientist put a head cam on his baby: The perspective of a child could help AI learn language—and tell us more about how humans manage the same feat, Sarah Zhang writes.
• A tool to supercharge your imagination: “New technologies for making pictures can be prosthetics for your mind,” Ian Bogost writes.
• Don’t talk to people like they’re chatbots: “AI could make our human interactions blander, more biased, or ruder,” Albert Fox Cahn and Bruce Schneier write.

P.S.

Earlier this week, The Atlantic published an article by the writer S. I. Rosenbaum exploring implants that allow the human brain to interface with computers. AI plays a substantial role, translating neural signals into commands that allow a mouse cursor to move, for instance. Another encouraging use of the technology, perhaps—though as Rosenbaum reports, there are still major challenges to overcome.

— Damon