
The Speakularity, Where Everything You Say Is Transcribed and Searchable - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/28/2050/what-searchable-speech-will-do-to-you
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jkot
Perhaps its because I grow up in a different culture, but I see completely
different use cases. There are already way too much though crimes, and mob
lynching over something simple as twitter.

Imagine local lynching club which assembles every Thursday evening (something
like bowling), 'data mines' nearest victim and have their way. All with silent
support from authorities, because their victim said something nine years ago,
which can be quoted out of context.

And once government and HR departments get their hands on this...

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monort
Short story "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" by Ted Chiang explores
this topic:

[https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_o...](https://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang)

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hellbanner
Hilarious alternatives to the Singularity:
[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1B75jindDAWsm8lBHPl4y...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1B75jindDAWsm8lBHPl4yT6u6yi-
IQMGimLcq8zWkW7Q/present?slide=id.i0)

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onion2k
The notion that we could turn speech in to searchable text in a useful way
betrays the author's knowledge of spoken communication. Very often it's not
the words that are the important bit. Unless the recording medium can add in
'Person A shrugged' or 'Person B replied 'Yes' but was being sarcastic', any
system will be next to useless.

~~~
Lawtonfogle
It'll still be useful, but for worse purposes. To be able to quote what
someone says with out being able to tell what is sarcasm will allow you to
create great attacks against that person which a significant portion of the
population will buy into. Imagine if we had every sarcastic quip from Snowden.
I'm sure there is at least one thing he has ever said that would make a lot of
people made if it were taken out of context.

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lesingerouge
English centric view to say the least. If the "speakularity" comes, given the
current state of transcription and voice recognition software it is very
probable that only english speaking people would be "affected".

~~~
realusername
French speaker agreeing here, the vocal recognition is currently at least 10
years behind English and I can't get any device to recognize anything
meaningful of what I say, I guess for the "speakularity", we can wait !

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caseysoftware
We're working on exactly that and you can play with it here:
[http://clarify.io/try-it-now/](http://clarify.io/try-it-now/)

While the words themselves _are_ important, it's the context that is even more
so. The difference between " _that 's_ a great idea" and "that's a _great_
idea" is huge.

We're already working on tone, volume, rate of speaking, and similar but
there's plenty of work to do. If you're interested in working in this space in
Austin, TX, drop me a note. :)

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SCHiM
Reading the first paragraph immediately reminds me of the The Quantum Thief by
Hannu Rajaniemi.

In it, there's a colony where every conceivable surface is covered with
sensors that monitor every aspect of life. It's stored encrypted in a publicly
available database that anyone can query (if you have the requisite encryption
key that is).

Very interesting to consider that such a database might not be that far off
into the future.

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treelovinhippie
I've been recording everything I say and hear for the past 5 years, with the
idea that eventually I'd be able to transcribe it and run all sorts of amazing
analysis and insights on the data. Thought, learning and vocabulary evolution.
AI replicas. Digital immortality.

Everyone is walking around with a microphone and camera in their pockets.
Recording video of people is still too visibly creepy (until we have cameras
hidden in RayBan-style sunnies), but recording audio from your pocket is
something you can do without causing a shitstorm around you (*yes, legally you
should tell people you're recording them).

So we launched a startup a few years ago called Lifebox:
[http://lifeboxapp.com](http://lifeboxapp.com), but even now it's still too
ahead of its time. Obtaining funding was impossible. Once we move past this
era of privacy concerns into a sousveillance culture, it's inevitable that
everyone will want to record and stream their lives 24/7.

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etiam
As far as I'm concerned this has already happened.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9525340](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9525340)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9492551](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9492551)

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pronoiac
I'm looking forward to great speech-to-text technology. I help run fan-driven
transcripts for a podcast, and I recently tried using Google's; it returned
something like the hosts were concussed, or Markov models of themselves.

Edit: the word salad result:
[http://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Podcast_107_Transcript_%28automated...](http://mefiwiki.com/wiki/Podcast_107_Transcript_%28automated%29)

~~~
caseysoftware
That's partially due to Google's approach. It _appears_ that they're building
a single model for every acoustic model, language, and domain. While that
works as a general purpose tool, it's less useful as you go down the rabbit
hole.

Side question.. how do you host your podcast? I'd love to chat if you get the
chance. My email is in my profile.

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ArekDymalski
TLDR: A collection of opinions about the future, based on the assumption that
we will record all our spoken words. The piece seems to be inspired by
particular Black Mirror episode and offers less frightening perspective.

EDIT: To make my comment sound less harsh, while providing useful summary I
made more detailed TLDRio:
[http://tldr.io/tldrs/55e826a5919e6e1a25000cb2/what-
searchabl...](http://tldr.io/tldrs/55e826a5919e6e1a25000cb2/what-searchable-
speech-will-do-to-you)

