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> Thompson remembers designing the Unix filesystem on a blackboard in an office with Rudd Canaday — using a special Bell Labs phone number that took dictation a

> Thompson remembers designing the Unix filesystem on a blackboard in an office with Rudd Canaday — using a special Bell Labs phone number that took dictation and delivered a typed-up transcript the next day. Fancy :), this just became normal for the general public in the last couple of years. I assume of course that there was a secretary at the end of the line, not AI. But it's not completely unthinkable, Bell Labs did do very impressive things in text-to-speech at least.

HPsquared 1y ago
My thoughts come more fluently as speech than in writing. With writing I'm always wanting to go back and edit, which is distracting.
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  Yeah, something about the ephemeral nature of spoken words that makes it easier to ramble and therefore go into unexpected and more "natural" directions, compared to text which I also have the need to strictly control as I'm typing it. Using dictation for when you really need to not go back and edit is really helpful.
  - MobiusHorizons 1y ago
    Best way I have found to get past this is to break the feedback loop. Easiest was is to type with my eyes closed , or on a system with high latency like epaper or ssh over lte. It forces me to do more work in my head and only use the computer to record it.
fuzztester 1y ago
>But it's not completely unthinkable, Bell Labs did do very impressive things in text-to-speech at least. They did a lot more than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs From the first paragraph at the above page (just for starters): >As a former subsidiary of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), Bell Labs and its researchers have been credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others, throughout the 20th century. Eleven Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.[1] Also see the section titled Discoveries and developments.
- oersted 1y ago
  Well yes of course, I just meant that them having voice transcription AI even in the 60s is not that unlikely, since they did a lot specifically in speech synthesis and audio analysis, besides everything else. I don't think they had it, but they had some of the important prerequisites figured out. I guess it makes sense, voice-related AI is highly relevant for a phone company. EDIT: Not full voice transcription, but it turns out that they did have systems to recognise digits and small (~a dozen) vocabularies of command words. The prototype called Audrey could recognise 0-9 spoken digits with 97% accuracy in 1952! Although it did have to be calibrated for each individual speaker.

HPsquared 1y ago

My thoughts come more fluently as speech than in writing. With writing I'm always wanting to go back and edit, which is distracting.

embedding-shape 1y ago
Yeah, something about the ephemeral nature of spoken words that makes it easier to ramble and therefore go into unexpected and more "natural" directions, compared to text which I also have the need to strictly control as I'm typing it. Using dictation for when you really need to not go back and edit is really helpful.
- MobiusHorizons 1y ago
  Best way I have found to get past this is to break the feedback loop. Easiest was is to type with my eyes closed , or on a system with high latency like epaper or ssh over lte. It forces me to do more work in my head and only use the computer to record it.

fuzztester 1y ago

>But it's not completely unthinkable, Bell Labs did do very impressive things in text-to-speech at least. They did a lot more than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs From the first paragraph at the above page (just for starters): >As a former subsidiary of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), Bell Labs and its researchers have been credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages B, C, C++, S, SNOBOL, AWK, AMPL, and others, throughout the 20th century. Eleven Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.[1] Also see the section titled Discoveries and developments.

oersted 1y ago
Well yes of course, I just meant that them having voice transcription AI even in the 60s is not that unlikely, since they did a lot specifically in speech synthesis and audio analysis, besides everything else. I don't think they had it, but they had some of the important prerequisites figured out. I guess it makes sense, voice-related AI is highly relevant for a phone company. EDIT: Not full voice transcription, but it turns out that they did have systems to recognise digits and small (~a dozen) vocabularies of command words. The prototype called Audrey could recognise 0-9 spoken digits with 97% accuracy in 1952! Although it did have to be calibrated for each individual speaker.