Chapter 25
Ten Stupid Dragon Tricks
In This Chapter
Dictating Jabberwocky
Dictating The Gettysburg Address
Dictating Shakespeare
Dictating proverbs
Dictating limericks
Dictating “Mairzy Doats”
Turning NaturallySpeaking into an Oracle
Singing
Dictating in foreign languages
Using Playback to say silly or embarrassing things
Nuance created NaturallySpeaking to handle dictation in contemporary English (or French or Italian or German or Spanish, if you have one of those versions). The idea was to make it easier for you to write letters or memos or detective novels or reports or newspaper articles. The vocabulary and word-frequency statistics are set up for this kind of contemporary writing.
But when people first sit down in front of a microphone to test NaturallySpeaking, what do they almost inevitably start dictating? Something from memory, which usually means something they had to memorize in school. Something written in an earlier time, in other words — Shakespeare or the Declaration of Independence.
NaturallySpeaking wasn’t designed to understand this kind of stuff, and it makes lots of mistakes. Some of them are downright hilarious. This causes people to laugh at their poor, abused NaturallySpeaking assistant, and to start feeding it stuff it couldn’t possibly digest: nonsense rhymes, text in unknown languages, you name it.
This is cruelty, plain and simple. The folks at Nuance have encouraged me to condemn such behavior in no uncertain terms, and so I will: It is bad. Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad! Bad!
So, purely out of humanitarian concern, and so that you won’t be tempted to do something like this yourself to your own poor, helpless computer program, I am (with great sorrow) publishing the results of my own Dragon transgressions. Remember: I am a professional. Don’t try these at home.
In the unlikely event that you’re the kind of person who would ignore my stern moral condemnation, you need to take two simple precautions to make sure that you don’t screw up the NaturallySpeaking training. (You don’t want NaturallySpeaking to expect you to talk like Shakespeare, do you?) Here are the things you shouldn’t do:
- Don’t correct any mistakes that NaturallySpeaking makes while you’re playing. If it interprets “forsooth” as “fort’s tooth,” leave it alone. Who knows? You might really want to say “fort’s tooth” someday.
- Don’t save your speech files when you are done. If you don’t save your speech files, it’s as if the whole session never happened. You’re like the stage hypnotist who says, “When you wake up, you won’t remember any of this.”
If you really, seriously want NaturallySpeaking to learn to recognize previous uses of English — say, if you’re a Shakespearean scholar or you frequently quote the Bible — it can, given time and training. Creating a new user for this kind of talk is best. Use Vocabulary Builder to introduce mass quantities of that kind of writing, and then just correct NaturallySpeaking whenever it gets something wrong. Forsooth, in a fortnight or so, your NaturallySpeaking assistant will be a veritable maven of the bardly tongue.
Dictating Jabberwocky
NaturallySpeaking is forced to interpret whatever you say as words in its active vocabulary. If you aren’t saying words at all, it just has to do the best it can. Turning “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!” into “Be where the jab are walk, my son!” has to be seen as a heroic effort on the software’s part. Ditto for turning “Callooh! Callay!” into “Colder! <colon> a!”
Here’s the original text of Jabberwocky written by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There in 1872:
- ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe. - “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!” - He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought. - And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came! - One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back. - “And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy. - ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
Here are some other odd word choices and even odder interpretations that result when you dictate Jabberwocky into NaturallySpeaking:
- What was read:
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe. - What was heard:
Twist drilling, and a slightly to those did Dyer and Kimball in the law: all names he were the Borg wrote us, and a moment as out crowd. - What was read:
Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! - What was heard:
Be where the jam are walk, my son! The John is that bite, the clause that catch! - What was read:
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch! - What was heard:
Be where the job show bird, and shunned from the a spend your snatched!
Dictating The Gettysburg Address
I dictated this immediately after General Training, when the system was most likely to misunderstand.
Picture Lincoln on the train to Gettysburg, dictating the following into his portable recorder:
“Or score and seven years ago homeowners brought forth on this continent emu nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that old men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a Greek Civil War, testing weather that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated Campbell into work.
“We are met on a Greek battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of battlefield as a final resting-place for those who hear gave their law is that that nation might live. It is altogether hitting and proper that we should do this. But in the larger cents, we cannot dedicate, we cannot concentrate, we cannot Howe of this ground. The brave men, living in dead who struggled here have concentrated it far above our war power to add or detract. The world will Littleton to normal remember what we say here, but he can never forget what they did here.
“Each use for us to living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they won’t here have thus far sewn openly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to decree task remaining before us — that control these honored dead we take increased devotion to that callers for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here Hialeah resolve that these dead shall not have died evening, that this nation undergone shall have a rebirth of freedom, and that government over the people, buying the people, for the people shall not parish from the earth.”
Dictating Shakespeare
NaturallySpeaking did rather badly when I dictated Romeo’s speech under the balcony, starting with, “What light through yonder window breaks?” But most of the mistakes are due to simple archaisms: “yonder window” becomes “the under Window,” and “vestal livery” turns into “us delivery.”
“What light through the under Window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the son. Arise, fair son, and kills the in the us Moon, who is already sick and pale with grief, that now her mate art far more fair that she; the not her mate, said she is envy of; her us delivery is but sick and green and non-but fools to where it; casting off.”
But it did even worse with Juliet’s reply. The biggest problem here is that in the alpha-bravo-charlie way of saying the alphabet, “romeo” is the letter R. Stranger still, “Capulet” is interpreted as “Cap period.” Because there is no capital period, NaturallySpeaking produces an ordinary period instead.
“O. r, r! Wherefore art that r? Deny the high father and refused I name; or, if now will cannot, be but sworn my love, and I’ll no longer be a.”
The bard’s poetry fared no better. Dictating, “Full fathom five thy father lies” resulted in “Full phantom 555 their lives.”
Antony’s speech over the body of Caesar is at least recognizable, possibly because, as he says: “I am no orator, … but … a plain blunt man.” But who is this Barry Caesar character, anyway?
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, land need your here is; I come to Barry Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that man to lives after them; the good is often incurred with their bones; so let it be with Caesar. The noble purchase have told you Caesar was ambitious: if it were so, it was a previous fault, and previously have Caesar answered it.”
Hamlet is an orator, but the NaturallySpeaking rendition of his speech needs a good editor. And don’t we all wish for “no blur in the mind?”
“To be, or not to be: that is the question. Whether to is no blur in the mind to suffer the swings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against the Sea of troubles, and by opposing and them?”
Dictating Proverbs
How about some ancient wisdom, Dragon-style? This is sooo close.
“A lie travels round the world while truth is putting her boots on.”
The Dragon heard:
“A light travels round the world while truth is putting her puts on.”
Dictating Limericks
Well, actually this one isn’t so bad. I tried to dictate:
“There once was a man from Peru, Who dreamed he was eating his shoe. He woke up in the night With a terrible fright To find it was perfectly true.”
NaturallySpeaking almost got it. If only I could have told it that the lines were supposed to rhyme.
“Their once was a man from Peru, Who treat he was eating his should. He woke up in the night With a terrible frightened To find it was perfectly true.”
Dictating “Mairzy Doats”
This one more-or-less speaks for itself (and please don’t get mad at me if this little ditty starts playing over and over in your mind after you read it!):
“Mayors he doubts, And does he doubts, And little land see tiny. Get lead 92, would you? Get lead 92, we can you?”
Turning NaturallySpeaking into an Oracle
You turn NaturallySpeaking into an oracle by abusing the Vocabulary Editor. The idea is to be able to ask NaturallySpeaking a question, and have it provide the answer. For example, you want to ask, “What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?” and have NaturallySpeaking answer “42” (or whatever you think the answer is).
The trick is to enter the answer as the written form in the Vocabulary Editor, and enter the question as the spoken form. So, for this example, do this:
- Choose Tools⇒Vocabulary Editor.
The Vocabulary Editor eventually makes the scene.
- In the Search For box, type 42 and then click Add.
The Add Word or Phrase dialog appears.
- In the Spoken Form (If Different) box, type What is the answer to life, the universe, and everything?
- Click Add and then click Close.
You’re done! Try asking NaturallySpeaking the question.
Singing
Singing doesn’t sound like speech at all. The tones jump around, and the pace is all wrong, too — at least from NaturallySpeaking’s point of view. It wants to insert extra words or syllables to account for those extended vowels, especially at the end of lines. There’s also no room in the song for you to insert punctuation, capitalization, or line breaks, so what you wind up with looks pretty weird.
Everyone who saw the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey remembers the computer HAL singing Bicycle Built for Two to his human colleague, Dave. I trained NaturallySpeaking until it could recognize the spoken lyrics of Bicycle Built for Two, and then sang the first verse. It came out looking like this:
“A. easy day easy to video around CERT true hot and the half crazy all for the love of you move it won’t be a stylish narrated shy can do for the carriage but you’ll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle build afford to”
Dictating in Foreign Languages
I dictated (and didn’t sing) the French verse of The Beatles song Michelle. I got something you can actually sing if you know the tune (but this version will never make the Hit Parade!):
“Michelle, mob they’ll Solely Mall key home trade BN owned song, Trade BN owned song.”
Using Playback to Say Silly or Embarrassing Things
Certain things just sound hilarious when they are said by an artificial voice. Anything passionate or whimsical takes on a Kafka-esque absurdity when proclaimed in Playback’s prosody-free manner.
The SyFy Channel has taken advantage of this phenomenon with its artificial announcer. After reading off the evening’s schedule, the SyFy announcer has said things like, “I am living la vida loca.”