Silence is Roman
Grandad August 24th, 2010
I was poking around on this laptop last night and discovered I apparently have speech recognition software on it.
Always one to try something new, I switched it on.
“Start” I said. It clicked on the Start button. I was impressed. I opened my text editor to see if I could dictate a letter to myself.
“Dear Grandad” I said. This confused it and it offered me alternative spellings of Grandad, such as ‘Granddad’. That annoys me when people haven’t the grace to know how to spell my name, so I told it the spelling was ‘Grandad’ and not to be so fucking smart. “What was that?” said the computer. I sighed.
I wasn’t sure what to say next, so I sat in silence for a couple of minutes. “Roman” it typed. What the fuck?
“Thank you for your recent letter” I said. “Thank you for your recent letter” it typed. At last, we were getting somewhere.
“Full stop” I said. “Bus stop” typed the computer. Twat! “Delete that” I said. It deleted it.
“Press enter” I said. “Rare centre” it typed. I sighed. It closed my browser. It was beginning to piss me off.
“Press tab” I said. “Gall stone” it typed. What the fuck?
“Help” I said. It opened the Help thing. Being a Microsoft thing, it was fuck all use to me. “Close” I sad. It closed Help.
“Show numbers” I said. It immediately covered my screen with numbered boxes. Now I couldn’t see what was under the numbers. I sighed. “What was that?” the computer said. “I fucking sighed” I said. “What was that?” the computer said. I sighed again. “What was that?” the computer said. “Go fuck yourself” I said.
….
Apparently it understood that.
I had to step away quickly.
I know computers take things literally but that was going a bit too far.
I don’t think my laptop will ever be the same again.
- computers
- Comments(6)
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It’s already plotting a terrible vengeance. Beware of the Skynet wannabe.
Marcus – It’s a bit knackered today after shagging itself half to death last night. I doubt it would have the energy to plot anything. How many more Romans are there in Rule Hibernia anyway? Or are you the last?
Keep an eye on it anyway.
No worries, there’re the three of us posting articles on Rule Hibernia.
So, speech recognition a no-go in future you think?
Don’t worry. I’ll keep it on a short leash. As for the speech recognition – I gave it another training session today. I gave up when I tried to open Notepad and it attempted to format the hard disk. Might try again another day?
I’d be a bit cautious about using the word “terminate” anywhere it could hear you and if it ask you to call it HAL, run.
I see speech recognition hasn’t improved all that much although your experience reminds me of a conversation I had with someone via Skype chat the other evening. Okay, it wasn’t quite a “conversation” per say but for awhile there the dialog was quite interesting.
Anyway, just give your laptop a cigarette and a shower and it should be find. And forget about that speech recognition thing as nothing is worse than having a laptop blow up in your…well…lap. Think about it.
Kirk M´s last brainfart .. Firefox extension to fix tiny site fonts