Voice recognition and speech synthises can be fun, if for no other reason than because it reminds us how truly stupid computers are … I think the humour comes in because we all anthropomorphise to some extent, and nothing reminds us of how unhuman computers are than when they try and act human.
Of course, some coincidences are just too funny. I remember us asking your car’s voice recognition GPS “where are the hookers?” and it coming back with the address of the nearest Howard Johnson’s hotel. THen we asked it to “find George Bush” and it seems he too was at the nearby Howard Johnson, with the hookers š
I think the big problem with voice recognition is that for it to be useful, it has to work like a human assistant. It has to listen in all the time, then be able to work on context, so the computer can provide the right bit of info at the right time, or be able to summarize the last 15 minutes of conversation. In other words, speech is great for communicating thought, it isn’t so great for giving extended series of commands. Until computers are smart enough to understand what we are talking about as we are talking about it, speech recognition will be of limited use. Computers hear fine, they “have good ears”. But they can’t understand what they hear, they have poor brains… and until then speech recognition will be like talking to an idiot. And we all know how unproductive that is š