That's really cool, but I don't know if I'd describe that example as being better at decoding phonetic symbols. You might still be better better at mapping pho

That's really cool, but I don't know if I'd describe that example as being better at decoding phonetic symbols. You might still be better better at mapping phonetic symbols to words and names you know -- which I think is a separate skill than mapping them to new words or names -- it's just that you didn't know that name and the software did. And it might also be better at knowing lots of words, which is yet another skill/property. If you both have learned the word, who is better at recognizing it? And who is better at learning a new word they don't know? These aren't very exacting questions because the comparison between human and machine knowing and learning hasn't been defined. Maybe the machine needs more examples and more contexts to learn a word as well as a human and correctly map to the word as often as a human, but it can also examine more examples and contexts than a human can per unit time and can do a lot of scaling in this regard using increased energy that a human cannot.