Waiting for the Speakularity
Anyway, his prediction was this:
Soon —perhaps not in 2011, but in the near future—
automatic speech recognition and transcription services would become
“fast, free, and decent.” In a jocular reference to the Singularity,
Ray Kurzweil’s label for the moment when we’ll be able to
upload our minds to computers and live forever,
Thompson called the arrival of free and accurate speech transcription
“the Speakularity.” He predicted it would be a watershed moment
for journalism, since it would mean that all of verbal information reporters collect
—everything said in interviews, press conferences, courtrooms,
city council meetings, broadcasts, and the like—
could easily be turned into text and made searchable.