yo homies sup?
The type of conversation with error rate greater than 10%--family-based--must be among the more difficult ones to interpret. First, there would be no attempt on the part of the speakers to mask any local accents or dialects. Second, they could be speaking in code. For example, when a person says "uh-huh", are they clearing their throat, or is it a meaningful contribution to the discourse, a token for a paragraph's worth of words? Third, they can refer to people by name, or by nickname, or by relationship or by creative insult. The only conversation that I think could be more challenging, would be between teenage friends.
Some years ago I heard a CBC radio interview of a newspaper reporter who developed an RSI through typing, presumably at a computer terminal. So he switched the text recognition software, best that money could buy at the time, one would assume (he was working for a top newspaper) but before long developed a vocal RSI, even more debilitating, because the software would not understand him unless he stopped briefly between each word. He took part in the interview only with some difficulty.
A final thought-sac: if they released very good OCR or speech recognition software, punters would reach a stage where they'd rarely be inspired to buy the next version or upgrade. It's a bit like Windows, where they're forever taking "one step forward, two steps back" to make your current User Experience on a par with Windows 2000 (taking into account that faster CPUs and gargantuan RAM should have improved your experience). At this point, one might well ask "so what's the excuse of [alternative family of OSes]?", but I'll put it in a more positive way, that I'm hoping they blow MS Windows out of the water on every level, before long.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
