Look at any con video on YouTube and turn on the "English Automatic Captions" - they're generated by some pretty good voice recognition software. But as you'll

Look at any con video on YouTube and turn on the "English Automatic Captions" - they're generated by some pretty good voice recognition software. But as you'll see, the results are a long way from perfect. My favourite example of misrecognition is one of Travis Goodspeed's talks, where YouTube's VR output "Geek women are expensive, but not prohibitively so." Voice recognition is OK but it falls a long way short of a usable level of accuracy, and even the accuracy it can muster goes right down the toilet if there is any background noise or music, or if the speaker is in any way unclear (accents, rushed or slurred speech, etc). There's a long way to go before you can just get a usable transcript of speech automatically. Quite a lot of voice recognition engines seem to have been trained on thousands of hours of C-SPAN or Meet The Press or something, because when recognition conditions get challenging, some engines start to degenerate into outputting nonsense like "congress Muslims Kenya capitol great today Cheney". There is no substitute for a human pair of ears and a lightning-fast means of text entry like a steno keyboard - nice to see Plover getting a mention in the source article too.