Monday, June 22, 2020

INTERIM REPORT

I am hard at work reading into my computer a lengthy speech I gave at Amherst College thirty-one years ago, using my new voice recognition program.  At one point, I quote an early passage from Marx.  Dragon is doing an heroic job.  It got Lake Woebegone right, but it crashed and burned on "Hegelians," rendering it as "hack aliens."

On the other hand, maybe the Dragon program was written by a closet Marxist.

9 comments:

  1. A "hack alien" is a Martian who thinks that Napoleon was the World Spirit on horseback (oops, maybe that was Hegel). ;)

    P.s. I know someone who wrote a dissertation on Hegelian aspects of a particular 20th cent painter's theories about art and painting, but the thought of reading a lot of Hegel was too much for this person, so for the nec background relied on secondary sources such as Charles Taylor's book on Hegel. Problem solved.

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  2. LFC, nice to see you get into the spirit of the thing.

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  3. Back in 1980 I was using an early (and quite wonderful) word processor on my early (and not so wonderful) PC. It had a spell checker. It didn't recognize 'Rockefeller but offered 'racketeer'.

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  4. I love a spell checker with a point of view.

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  5. Hi Professor,

    An OCR website using uploaded cell phone pictures of the document might save substantially more time than dictation, if that option is amenable. For an example:

    https://ocr.space/

    This option would work best if the pictures are compiled first into a pdf, which can be done on other free sites like this one:

    https://combinepdf.com/

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  6. Microsoft uses a speech to text engine for voicemails left in its enterprise phone systems...some of the mistranslations at work are pretty hilarious.

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  7. I will forevermore refer to Hegelians as "hack aliens". A delicious bon mot!

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