I loathe computer systems that pretend to be people on the phone.

And Spidra, I actually had to post again to check my tagline, but yeah, I'm going through a bit of a Music Man phase.

A non-hatable voice-recognition application is your voice-triggered cellphone.

Ooh, or my dad's minivan! You can tell it "Go home" and it'll map a route back to our house. (Unfortunately, our street is wrong on every map in existance, so the GPS software in practice maps a route to about 50 feet from our house. And it doesn't believe in the street that extends from the bottom of the hill to where our street actually begins. But in theory, it's a very cool feature.)

You can also tell it to turn the radio on and vocally control the volume.

That first Chronicle article annoyed me, too.

But a University of Michigan study shows that the percentage of married women with advanced degrees has grown, not shrunk, over time.

OK, I'm guessing the number of people with advanced degrees has grown over time. Given that, wouldn't the real question be the percentage of women with advanced degrees who are married?

And...O'Reilly called the Great Britain intelligence service "M one 6." Uh...

Hahahahahahahahahaclunk. Uh-oh.

I loathe computer systems that pretend to be people on the phone.

I'm okay with voice recognition in general, but the ones that add in verbal litter piss me off. I know you're a computer, you can't fool me by adding "Okay" to the beginning of every sentence!

It's not "intelligent" persay, but it is a human job that is now done by machines.

Oh, I see. No, I don't think of that as intelligent either. Just following a narrow set of instructions.

I hate Microsoft Word, but that doesn't make it any less of a software application.

Yeah, but if you couldn't get it to process words satisfactorily, you might consider it less of a word processor. If they displayed an adequate capability to do the job at hand, I might be less averse to calling them intelligent.

A non-hatable voice-recognition application is your voice-triggered cellphone.

Oh! I didn't know that was the sort of VR you meant. I still think of that as pattern matching. Since I'm training it with my voice. Now the ones that are supposed to recognise anyone saying many words -- that's a hell of a task.

A hundred years ago, when they started putting in the voice-recognition thing, I called my father collect. The computer asked if he'd accept the call. He said, "You betcha!" Needless to say, that did not work out.

I'm down with taking out O'Reilly, but we should've done it last week so we could laugh evilly and say "Happy Holidays," at the same time. Or Merry Fucking Christmas.

That first Chronicle article annoyed me, too.

I don't know who this is in response to and which article but I agree that the sf chron article about trend pieces managed to be guilty most of the exact same sins-- fudging, hedging, observation posing as proof, and speculation.

When Gawker was under one of the old editors (I think Spiers) they used to run pieces on "two is a trend!" articles. Used to be that three instances was a trend, now two is enough. I never noticed it before but they were so right.

I remember reading a while ago about a voice-recognition customer service dealie that was supposed to detect stress and modulate its actions accordingly. (In theory, so that angry customers could get to a real person faster and thereby become less angry.) Did that ever go anywhere?