Twelve years on, this is no longer the stuff of science fiction.
But just like Samantha, automatic speech recognition systems still cannot do everything that a human listener can.
Maybe youve dictated a note on your phone, only to spend time editing garbled words.
Linguistics and computer science researchers have shown that these systems work worse for some people than for others.
Or they take a probabilistic guess, a move that can sometimes result in an error.
Imagine sometime in the near future youve been hurt in a car crash.
What causes this kind of error to occur?
But whose speech are they feeding them?
With rigorous data collection from a diverse range of sources, AI developers could reduce these errors.
They echo prescriptive, sometimesprejudiced notionsof correctness in speech.
In fact, AI has been proven to flatten linguistic diversity.
The offering perpetuates the notion that some accents are less valid than others.
With AI, at least for now, it either works or it doesnt.
If the system can process what you say, you are good to go.
If it cannot, the onus is on you to make yourself understood.
