Wreck an icing’s beach again
Back in the late '90s, I wrote a column on computer speech recognition.
The state of the art has progressed somewhat since then. One of the new uses for the technology is Google Voice, which (among other things) automatically transcribes phone messages.
Unfortunately, it's not perfect at doing so yet. On the upside, though, that fact provides us with some entertaining mis-transcriptions. David F. Gallagher of the New York Times asked readers to call his Google Voice number and leave him a message to be transcribed, and he's posted both the original audio messages and the transcriptions, along with notes on some of his favorite mistakes. For example, in one snippet "fascinating and hilarious" became "fascinating pencil areas."