Can You Hear Me Now?
Chapter 8 is about user interface and interacting with digital content. In this chapter there is a section titled: Voice Recognition and Speech Synthesis. I like how the book describes computer voice recognition to the science world, "...[these] have been a hallmark of science fiction for generations and are slowly becoming a central part of the real-world computing environment." It goes on to tell how the 1970s and the 1980s were a primitive time for voice recognition and synthesis. The computer had to have hours of training with the person's voice and the speaker had to pronounce commands in staccato style with pauses between each word. The vocabulary of the computer was also very limited. With the voice recognition and synthesis technology that we have today, a drawl back that the book lists is noise. It gives the reader a picture of a classroom where kids are giving commands to their computers. If everyone were doing this the noise would be too great and the computer wouldn't do the right command or might not even function.

I believe for some computer programs that voice recognition is a good thing. I helped one of my girlfriends install a program where she could read a paper and the computer would type it for her. It was really cool. She did have to go through and "train" her computer to know her voice and the way it fluctuated. The papers weren't flawless because of homophones and some spellings (like cities), but indeed a big time saver in the end. For public use, this new technology could be bad, but for private use it is great!
Classwork