Major technological advances are to be expected from decade to decade, and that’s a fact. But when we set expectations for our future, people never take into account social change; they simply use their current culture and attitude as a baseline for “how things will be.” Someone from the nineteen fifties who travelled to the here-and-now would certainly be shot down to realize that despite all the keen gadgets we have today, most people are just wet rags…
Most people know AT&T as “the telephone company,” but have little concept that they actually developed a ton of other technology still in use today. Beginning in the 1980’s, AT&T implemented automated speech recognition technology across its networks, and has continued to streamline the system ever since. Rather than simply understanding the words, AT&T’s speech recognition uses artificial intelligent to actually understand the spoken language.
At times, interfacing with other software seems counterproductive, given that it will often take written (or typed) data and read it back as voice before processing commands, but when you’re looking at the most advanced speech recognition in the world, it does make an odd bit of sense.
Just about every time you post any message, sign up for an account, or punch in a wrong password, you get stuck with stupid “Enter the text/numbers” CAPTCHA codes. And now we know for certain, and by its own admission, that CAPTCHA sucks.
