Slashdot Mirror
The Speakularity, Where Everything You Say Is Transcribed and Searchable
An anonymous reader sends an article from Nautilus about the possible future of speech recognition software. Today, hundreds of millions of people are walking around with devices that can not only record sound, but also do a decent job of turning spoken word into searchable text. The article makes the case that the recording and transcription of normal conversation will become commonplace, sooner or later. Not only would this potentially make a lot more interesting discussion available beyond earshot, but it could also facilitate information retrieval on a personal level.
The article makes an analogy with email — right now, if you communicated with somebody through email a decade ago, you don't have to remember the specifics — as long as you didn't delete it or switch email providers, you can just search and look at exactly what was said. Of course, the power of such technology comes with trade-offs — not only would we be worried about the obvious privacy issues, but many people may feel restricted by always "performing" for the microphones. Some researchers also worry that if we have technology to remember for us, we'll put much less effort into remembering things ourselves.
The article makes an analogy with email — right now, if you communicated with somebody through email a decade ago, you don't have to remember the specifics — as long as you didn't delete it or switch email providers, you can just search and look at exactly what was said. Of course, the power of such technology comes with trade-offs — not only would we be worried about the obvious privacy issues, but many people may feel restricted by always "performing" for the microphones. Some researchers also worry that if we have technology to remember for us, we'll put much less effort into remembering things ourselves.
Not everything that is technically feasible becomes commonplace. Despite increasingly clever marketing creating artificial demands, people still tend to have their own mind.
They're correct and it's too late, at least for me. I've been using email in this manner since around 2001 or so and have an entire archive of all of my email to back around 1997 or so. I haven't had to revisit 1997-2002, but I still maintain the archive. As for 2002-forward, I use it often to find something that I worked on for one employer or another through those years and will continue to do so. I don't feel there's a need to use brain cells to remember something that's at my finger tips and yes, I am aware, if the SHTF, I won't be able to retrieve everything in there.... the way I look at that, if the SHTF, I won't give a damn about some piece of information from 2002. /CF
haha. Wow. Tom Scott seems to have called it. Now all we need is Apple to come up with mini cameras in the earbuds.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Looking forward to this tech evening up arguments with my wife.
Certainly would promote responsible speech (or at least greater caution)
Yes - just like slashdot archives promote responsible speech ... Oh Wait!
Seriously the fun starts when they have reliable transcription and speech recognition!
That's when the successors to Google glass not only deliver images to our eyes but also monitor them at the same time and record what we're looking at.
We need a "+1 -- nice sig" moderation.
I learned this as well. Best long term storage because it is readable by any mail program is by using Thunderbird. Outlook can do integrity checks on a mailbox, but only it can use its own format.
Then there is finding a compressing/archiving format. WinRAR or tar/xz/par are good options for this. This way, the mail spool with 100-200 gigs of spam gets reduced by an order of magnitude at the minimum.
As for storage? Different media. One copy on DVD, one on an external HDD, and perhaps one stashed on Amazon Glacier (although retrieving it can be costly.)
Just store it as plain text. That way you avoid the silly pictures, the 'signatures' that take up a whole screen and a couple of megabytes.
And Comic Sans.
It's way better to get rid of Comic Sans.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If you use an email client for email, rather than a web browser, there's little reason you wouldn't have email from a decade ago handy. Unless you choose to delete the local copies, of course. What I do, is every year or two I make a subfolder under Sentbox, Sentbox/2012-213/ and drag the old emails there. Folders other than Sentbox and Trash generally don't get subfolders, "eBay receipts" has everything I've ever bought and sold on ebay.
Many people who use IMAP have it set to delete the local copies automatically, but there's no need to use that setting.
Well thanks to the wonders of OCR we can already google physical books and street views. So the next step would be to extend recognition technology from static objects to events, objects with the added dimension of time.
It sounds crazy but are we really that far behind with always listening devices? Imagine brand recognition or "need fulfillment" services pinging off everything you say
"Man, it's hot out" translates into a device showing a Coke advert. I feel like this isn't far off
If you have not seen it, I would suggest watching Black Mirror TV series. Season 2 Episode 1 (usual wikipedia spoilers at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) is about similar subject - having devices which record everything you see and hear and being able to replay it all at any point.
>> having devices which record everything you see and hear
Those are called cell phones. And Windows 10 machines (soon to be backported to Windows 7/8).
>> being able to replay it all at any point
I think we know who already has those.
The decade ago email doesn't work. Over a few years and a few different email systems that you were using your email archive will become lost or unusable in that time frame.
So good luck with that.
Luck?
One doesn't need "luck" anymore when the online world has access to free webmail, which is also pretty much unlimited in storage capacity with every offering. I've already got a decades worth of email stored in the cloud, instantly searchable. There are also several solutions available to consolidate other email into a single platform/solution, eliminating the burden of managing multiple email systems.
And if you're concerned about those free webmail services going away, let's be realistic here. They're not going to. Ever. The NSA alone will ensure that.
As far as work email, that's easy. Retention policies dictate we can't save anything older than five years anyway. Works for me, and I honestly wish we would promote that mentality more with personal communication. Why exactly do I need to save that shit for 50+ years? Let's hear all the shitty reasons come forth.
I have every email sent & received since '94, all in mbox format by year by email address. Easy to do and it comes in handy. Why not record conversations too!
"but many people may feel restricted by always "performing" for the microphones. "
You'd better already be that _today_. Not only the NSA listens, as we lately discovered, depending on where you live, half the time you are phoning over one of the police's illegal stingray 'cell-towers'.
So, don't talk about tax-evasion, drug orders or merchandise that 'fell off the truck' and so on.
Just think about a law suit where discovery has started. Anything that you had recorded and could be searched with be a record that the court could require you to produce. Talk about hanging yourself......
I can't say I've looked at anything older than about 3 years, but I do have it going back > 10 years - even though I have changed ISPs 4 times.
And the thing that made it even funnier, the old lady that said "Hey, I speak jive"..was the lady that played June Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver, about the whitest lady you could find at the time!!
Ah...man, I bet in today's ultra PC society, you'd never get a movie like Airplane made again.
There's lots of great movies that likely could not be made today. I don't think Fast Times at Ridgemont High could get made today since it portrayed underage teen sex....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Are you seriously thinking that THAT is something we need?
Right now, people are getting too scared to say much of anything which is the direct opposite of what we need.
We need lots of speech, we need more speech that you and others may disagree with....
If we keep getting fearful or overthinking what we say...eventually nothing useful gets said anymore.
"Responsible" speech...WTF is that anyway?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Tonight when I go to bed I will be thankful that there's one less day to live.
"Certainly would promote responsible speech (or at least greater caution)"
And new legislation. Depending upon what state you are in, recording audio undisclosed is against the law. Third party disclosure of undisclosed recordings is another matter in itself.
How long before the fist lawsuit (or arrest) over undisclosed text copy of a conversation? I hope soon, if I hear one more done story, I'm going to barf!
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
If this becomes wide spread and available to everyone everywhere, we may finally come to peace with the fact that we're all hypocrites. I have come to the conclusion that pointing out someone else's hypocrisy is just a tool used for momentary one-up-manship.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
Yeah, that just rolls off the tongue...
Don't quit your day job. Unless you're in marketing, in which case you should quit because you're terrible at it.
#DeleteChrome
you can just search and look at exactly what was said
Excepting Secretaries of State, of course.
I just aliased the reformat command to the word 'Benghazi'.
Have gnu, will travel.
Nowadays we wring our hands and tsk-tsk the loss of old film reels, books, and magazines, fearing the loss of part of our culture. In the future, people will yearn for the golden days of yore, when an inappropriate remark might elicit a titter of embarrassed laughter before vanishing into the fog of entropy.
The translate option in G+ actually does a decent job of translating that sort of text. When I first noticed it I thought, LOL that is racist, then I realised that it is actually very useful.
NSA and FBI wet dream that is what it is. hell no, i will never allow that. Even if i did i can't even find an email from 6 months ago for something. Unless i tag it on the fly i would never find half of my stuff. the data would have to be auto tagged or organized properly. I do think there is software for that, but I don't think consumers are going to like the creepy feel of searching every word you ever spoke..
NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER GIVE UP! "No limitations, no boundaries, there is no reason for them."
Truth and honesty are areas that we will have more and more trouble with. People really do not want openes as most feel that they are the ones who will suffer if exposed.