ncyoung.com

I have always laughed at the various attempts at voice recognition that I've run into, but last night I was surprised for the first time.

The voice recognition used by the toll free directory assistance ("information" for 800 numbers) is impressive. It's really fast and accurate, I called back a few times just to play with it. (800)555-1212

Eliza is an older and not very smart conversation bot that talks to you by mirroring parts of your own phrases interspersed with stock phrases.

In this amazing experiment, Eliza was given an interface to AOL instant messenger and talked to a series of random strangers. It's amazing to see their misconceptions grow. Some people never realize anything, others quickly get frustrated and sign off, but none that I saw realized they were talking to a machine.

AOLiza

Advanced machine intelligence used to analyze google search results...

http://www.googlism.com/

Some terms I tried:

public relations
war on terrorism
war on drugs
snuggly bunny
hello kitty (must try)
california uber alles
humanitarian aid
elvis
alcoholic father
never ending story

So much more fun than typing "hello kitty is" into google yourself...