
How the NSA converts spoken words into searchable text - jbegley
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/05/nsa-speech-recognition-snowden-searchable-text/
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Killah911
I've worked on similar problemsss starting with Microsoft's speech SDK back in
the 90's. This is more of a pain the the ass than it first appears to be. I
was secretly excited that maybe NSA has cracked a difficult nut here. (NDA be
damned, I'd like to see this in the commercial market)

While the whole spying thing is disconcerting, I wonder how much cool tech
they have that could be put to commercial use. wondert if theres a path for a
government agency such as NSA to share tech breakthroughs with the public
sector. Nasa does this to some degree...

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asdrty
I thought that all NASA technology was open to the public... Isn't that how
SpaceX started?

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ncza
NSA, not NASA.

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asdrty
FYI: I was replying to this part of the comment: "Nasa does this to some
degree..."

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6d0debc071
I rather assumed the tech transfer for this went in the opposite direction:
that a reason Google, and Microsoft, and Apple were developing, and providing
for free, voice recognition on consumer devices was that they wanted to get
the technology to a point where they could sell, or license, it to the NSA.

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lern_too_spel
That's a very strange way of looking at it. Those companies would want to sell
such a service or product to anybody and everybody, including the NSA. You
might as well say that the reason Dole grows pineapples is that they want to
sell those pineapples to the NSA.

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partisan
You could use that analogy, but only if the NSA really really liked
pineapples. They really really like spying on people and therefore like the
technologies that allow them to do so. And they have a lot of money and power
that would appeal to a company that might want to dabble in the gray areas of
legality with regards to privacy.

You might argue that Facebook works to perfect facial recognition and
identification technologies to sell them to the NSA, along with that nice full
database of people and their pictures. That would make more sense than
pineapples.

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lifeisstillgood
I think the pineapple thing could be a major insight. After Microsoft, the
NSA's famous mission statement was to put a pineapple on every desk.

The DoD explicitly want to "deter war and provide security for our pineapples"
and NASA infamously put a test pineapple into space in 1963, long before a
test pilot.

Of course we must not forget the clearest endorsement of pineapple in American
Life, in the most famous text of all, where Jefferson (himself secretly
addicted to its juices) said "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Pineapples"

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kordless
Followup article: [https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/11/speech-
recogni...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/11/speech-recognition-
nsa-best-kept-secret/)

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sunsu
There is an easy API for this now: [http://Clarify.io](http://Clarify.io)

We use it to allow our customers to search their calls and voicemail messages.

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CyberDildonics
I just assumed they had dragon naturally speaking running on a pentium and
windows 95

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samstave
The floating point bug prevented that project from succeeding.

