Tag: corporation

Spenser Skates on Voice Recognition: A Problem Where There’s No Clear Right Answer — & How I Wrote About That 5 Years Ago

A wonderful reader sent me this article quoting ex-Sonalight CEO Spenser Skates. Notably:

“We spent a month just talking and exploring different ideas. You really want to find a problem that fits your strengths, weaknesses, and interests. Voice recognition was almost too hard technically to solve. It’s like this probabilistic problem where there’s not a clear right answer. Analytics, to the average engineer, it’s a pretty hard problem — but to us, it was a cakewalk, because we were algorithm guys. Building a distributed data store was very straightforward for us. It’s like ‘OK, that’s a solvable problem with a clear answer. If we do it, people want it. Great, let’s go to work on that.’ It was a million times easier.” Ex-Sonalite CEO Spenser Skates speaks about why him and his co-founder moved from “solving” voice recognition to “solving” analytics.

Let me get some self-aggrandizement in.

Half a decade ago, I wrote that computers only do what you give them instructions to do, and explained that there are solvable and insolvable problems. And I explained that voice recognition is a solvable problem, but that it will take indeterminate time and resources to solve. The CEOs, salespeople, and software engineers of the world know this already. They have probably known it decades longer than the vast majority of the population. Despite that, they lie and say their products are better than they are so that they can try to recoup the investor money they’re burning on what is — like Mr. Money Bags just told you — a “probabilistic problem where there’s not a clear right answer.” Said another way, some of the brightest minds on this planet could not, and still cannot, figure this problem out 100% despite the billions of dollars spent to solve it. It’s not quite as much as it would be to solve world hunger, but let’s just say we could’ve solved some pretty big problems with the time and money spent on “get computer to know what I say.”

Then journalists lap up the bullshit and ride the hype train, because who’s going to challenge Microsoft? Who’s going to challenge Google? Who’s going to challenge these rich and powerful entities and power players that make money off of the ignorance and fanciful beliefs of a population that believes with all its heart that tech will solve all our problems and grow exponentially into some kind of singularity (partial joke)?

Stenography’s citizen journalist remains reliant on your eyes. Please continue to send me stuff like this. I’m grateful.

P.S.

Rant that I felt better for a post script.

It is not the job of journalists to be seekers of the truth. They have become stenographers for the rich and powerful. Stenographers are uniquely positioned to fill the gap. I dare say that, just by presenting what two different sides say, we’d be doing more journalism. Because I’m at a stage in my life where I’ve told multiple journalists about the blatant fraud being committed and they’ve either danced around the issue and eliminated what I told them from the article, like Maia Spoto did, or participated in “journalistic equalizing,” as Steve Lerner did. De facto silencing of the truth through blatant and indefensible lies of omission. Could be their editors. Could be the culture of their outlets. Could be that journalists discriminate against people like me that are open and honest about mental health struggles and successful ongoing treatment. Could even be that some journalists are independently wealthy and see people like me as being against wealthy people, and they don’t like that. The nuance of “no, I don’t hate people with money for having money. I know people who are better off than I ever will be and we’re cool because they don’t steal from their employees or engage in schemes to defraud thousands of jobseekers” is often lost on my detractors. I’ve been told maybe our field isn’t exciting enough to write about. But at a certain point it’s almost comical to look back at the number of journalists that uncritically published about our labor shortage only to turn around and ignore the fraud claims.

What can I do but publish my findings and see what happens? Maybe someday court reporters will realize that they give millions of dollars to the National Court Reporters Association each year and it was ready, willing, and did actually watch the Speech-to-Text Institute flood the market with lies and set the stage for stenographer jobs to be eliminated. By contrast, court reporters gave me $10,000 and I made sure the STTI got sued and shut down its website.

It’s kind of like how I feel about CoverCrow. More adoption of the cause would benefit us. Issues could be worked out. Once the thing became self-sustaining, it would give working reporters a lot more power because it would decentralize the method by which they find and agree to jobs. It’s just math and reasoning.

Similarly, if there were more widespread adoption of my sort of brand of journalism, there would be significant systemic changes. It’s a power dynamic thing. Without checks, wealth concentrates at the top. The top then uses its power to effectively control government regulators (corporate capture) This is the basis of logic for our antitrust laws. That concentration is currently what’s happening all across America (corporate consolidation).

In a functioning democratic republic, the government enforces the laws that stop wealth from concentrating to that very dangerous point. If the government failed to do so, the free press would jump in and destroy every single politician involved in the wholesale selling of the country (Citizens United & beyond). The government isn’t enforcing the law and the free press is literally actively assisting in the fuckification of America by blacking out opposition voices, effectively handing a monopoly to “the concentrated wealth” with regard to the narrative that the public hears.

It’s said that Einstein wrote about a time when the very rich would control the means of communication and it would be impossible for citizens to make informed decisions. Democracy would be broken. According to Full Fact, this is not true. Einstein wrote that that had already happened in 1949.

We have had over 70 years of corporate consolidation since then.

(And Robert Reich states in my fuckification link that corporate consolidation costs the average American family over $5,000 a year. So if anyone here thinks that something that costs the average family over 5% of their income is a political idea not worth covering, I respectfully disagree. Thanks again, reader!)

NCRA and NYSCRA: For Stenographers

It is with a great deal of enjoyment that I share what happened this weekend. NCRA sent out an email blast that it was suspending its corporate partner solicitations. Some of its fabulous directors took to Facebook to share the message as well. I think this is great on a lot of levels. They’re paying attention to our preferred social media space. They’re paying attention to the fact that some of our corporate partners are not being very partnery. They’re reaffirming that they are us.

We all together support the stenographic modality of transcription and record making. NCRA sounds serious about a transformation, and we hope it continues on its current course towards educating the public that this a viable and vibrant career choice and that stenographic reporting is among the best speech-to-text “applications” around. Compared to the NVRA, which doesn’t bother to write back when I ask questions, NCRA’s responsiveness and commitment to its members and potential members is refreshing. I hope that responsiveness continues. I hope that any members that have smart suggestions for changes to the corporate partnership program write in to NCRA today. Out of the many thousands of us, I am sure there are smart and acceptable solutions to be had.

Now I’ll turn to NYSCRA, who also put out a statement reaffirming their commitment to stenography. Let’s face the facts: NYSCRA is an association by stenographers for stenographers. Up until recently, only working stenographers could hold office or vote. We recently held a vote to allow retired stenographers and amazing stenographic educators like Karen Santucci to have officer and voting privileges. The results of such vote were not yet announced, but make no mistake that I was right there voting yes with many of you. NYSCRA is not being coy or dishonest about what they’re saying. They do give entities that donate recognition for donating. Years ago I helped sponsor the breakfast in a Long Island meeting, and my name was right alongside the other sponsors as I recall. I had no control over the breakfast, the event, or anything like that. Sponsors do not control NYSCRA.

Consider this a call for all to get more involved. And don’t believe what you hear. You can get involved in event the smallest of ways. Taking the time to write a suggestion is involvement. Taking the time to attend a meeting is involvement. Even taking some time out to discuss an issue with a colleague and work through the pros, cons, and challenges of an idea can be involvement. Some would have you believe that you must be donating, volunteering, hosting, and traveling to be involved. For those that have the time and energy, we are grateful. But the time things really shine is when a member like you takes up one issue, any issue that you truly believe is important to steno, and makes the associations aware that it can be on their radar. It’s when real members like you step up and propose solutions to the problems we face.

Some look at a question and say: If it was important, someone would’ve answered it already. All I have to ask is: What would make your profession better?