Weekend Thinking: Where is Voice Recognition Going?
What if you got into a disagreement with your significant other about who said they’d pick up supper or clean the bathroom next or pay the internet bill but instead of arguing about it, you could just scroll back to earlier that day to see who had really said what?
We all know about Siri for iPhones and Alexa for Amazon’s Echo, technology that recognizes voice commands, though not always accurately. This technology is constantly being tweaked and improved so it stands to reason that at some point soon, voice recognition could be a lot more accurate and serve different purposes.
But what might that look like?
Manoush Zomorodi and the Note to Self podcast team explored the possibility of a “transcribed life” where machines could consistently recognize and transcribe our speech patterns. They questioned how being recorded and having those recordings transcribed at all times might affect the way we interact with each other. And then they tried it out.
The technology could be beneficial, but would we really be comfortable knowing that anything we said or did could be referenced and brought back out at any point?
Reminiscent of The Twilight Zone in its presentation of nightmarish sci-fi situations, the British anthology-style TV series Black Mirror looks at an extreme version of this in its episode “The Entire History of You.” The plot follows characters in an alternate universe where implantations record everything they do, see or hear and allow memories to be played back either in front of the person’s eye or on a screen.
Things of course get ugly as memories that should have been secret become not so secret.
There is no question that technology is getting to the point of being able to record the goings-on of our lives, it’s just a matter of whether the benefits would outweigh the surrender of privacy and how this kind of recording would even work from a legal standpoint.
Is it just better to leave those little arguments between ourselves alone?