I have several post ideas queued up waiting for my brain to reorganize itself after several very stressful weeks, but today I came across an article thanks to Slashdot that I feel a need to comment upon.

The article is entitled, “Rest in Peas: The Unrecognized Death of Speech Recognition“, by a fellow named Robert Fortner. I don’t know who Mr Fortner is, honestly, but that doesn’t matter to me much. I mean, not a lot of people know who I am, either, and that doesn’t keep me from venturing opinions I hope people will find interesting

ANYWAY, the gist of Mr Fortner’s article is that, bluntly, speech recognition is a failed technology, and possibly an impractical one for the foreseeable future. Despite 40 years or so of research, despite Google releasing a corpus of a trillion words to feed to recognition engines, speech recognition accuracy has more or less topped out at 80%, and stalled there for over a decade. No really serious research seems to be ongoing either into existing approaches or into completely new ones. The longstanding belief that, if we could teach computers language, that would lead to AI, is being turned on its head, with some people now certain that, without true AI, computers will never really understand language.

It’s a disappointing conclusion, but one that I can’t really disagree with. Continue Reading »

Let’s start out with the obvious: Russell T. Davies ressurrected Doctor Who. In the process, he also completely re-created the concept of “family television”, meaning television the entire family actually watches together, as opposed to something the kids watch while the parents ignore them. He did two things that everyone, himself included, were fairly sure were impossible, and in a way that appears to be sustainable without him ¹

Given how savage I’ve been about RTD’s writing in some of my recent reviews, you might find this praise surprising, but it’s nothing but the documentable truth. Doctor Who had collapsed in the late 80s, and languished as a television property for nearly 15 years. Lots of people wanted to see it revived, but nobody was quite sure how to do successfully accomplish it.

Until RTD found a way.

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I have a number of fellow geek friends who are deeply distressed by the current trend in computerized gadgetry, in particular, the iPhone and the much rumoured, but, as of this writing, still entirely vapourware Apple tablet device.

Myself, I think it’s pretty much where the industry’s been heading since the day the first truly retail home computers hit the market, and more to the point, I think it’s exactly what they should be doing.

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