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SpinVox "Recognition" Is Often Expensive Human Transcription
An anonymous reader writes "SpinVox offers to convert voice messages to text using a system called D2 or 'the Brain.' According to BBC News, said 'Brain' is often of the old-fashioned kind: SpinVox is sending private voice messages to South Africa, the Philippines, and maybe Egypt to be typed by people in a call centre, despite being registered as keeping all private data inside Europe and claiming that the text is somehow anonymised. Insiders say they transcribed 'love messages, secret messages' and everything else from beginning to end, and the company is being bled dry by the cost: SpinVox has been locked out of one of their data centers over a payment dispute. SpinVox refuses to comment further on details — but according to their web page, they're 'enabling the Speech 3.0, Voice 3.0, and Business 3.0 markets,' whatever that means."
Even after decades of Moore's Law advances, computers still can't even convert speech to text with any kind of reliability. Artificial intelligence capable of passing the Turing test? Please.
Speech recognition is just so trivial a thing compared to human-level AI, it's like the difference between learning to walk and flying to the moon. And we still can't even walk properly without falling down all over the place yet.
I can guarantee real AI will never be achieved in my lifetime. And quite possibly not in anybody's liftetime.