Deepgram finds speech with A.I.

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“Searching through recordings is really difficult. In terms of workflow, usually the raw audio is transcribed into text, which is then fed into a search tool. If you transcribe using human transcription, it’s too time consuming and expensive. If you try to do it with automatic speech-to-text then search accuracy is the problem. […] Deepgram is an artificial intelligence tool that makes searching for keywords in speeches, private conversations and phone calls faster, cheaper and easier than the old way of doing things. Deepgram indexes audio files in more than half the time of a human transcriber, and costs only 75¢ per hour of audio.”

Amazing. Try it for yourself and see if it doesn’t blow your panties off.

VICE News

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Watched my (the) first installment of Vice Nightly News last night. And loved it. But not sure I can describe it. But I’ll try.

  • Different look and feel. Black and white graphics. And big. More web-like than TV’ish. Faster pacing.
  • No anchor. At least no “talking head” anchor. Just a normal (female) voice over the video and graphics. And the package reporters were normal people as well. Looked like real people and talked like real people. You’ll have to watch this to get what I’m trying to describe.
  • Natural writing style. I noticed this immediately. Sharp contrast (for me) to the “news speak” we get from the networks and cable news.
  • Watching debate #2 with Glenn Beck. One of the longer segments. A bit like a serious Stephen Colbert interview.
  • No ads. Thank you, HBO. Didn’t realize how a dozen adult diapers and Flomax ads trash up a news program.

The producers didn’t just take the ancient evening news format we’ve been watching for 60 years and tweak it. They started fresh. Your grandpa ain’t gonna like Vice Nightly News. But I ain’t your grandpa.

UPDATE: Music critic Bob Lefsetz says Vice News Tonight is “the real thing.”

“The hosts were a cornucopia of sexes and ethnicities. They looked like America. Where everybody is just not an old white man. […] The networks think it’s about slickness. The local stations are a joke, peopled by bimbos, both male and female, it’s a caricature of the news. […] They humanized Glenn Beck, a seeming impossibility.”

DSL Repair

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phoneguyBeen having problems with my DSL service (losing connection, slow speed) and the phone company sent a tech this morning. (Second time someone has been out in the last week or so) He could see there was a problem with the line, somewhere upstream, and — to save time — called the tech who came out previously since it was recent enough he might remember the call. He did and provide useful info.

I asked Mike (the tech who came out this morning) if he could access records from the previous call. From his reply I gathered only the barest minimum of information is recorded. Not surprising because who wants to write up a report once the problem is fixed.

But would it really be that difficult? Take out your smartphone, dictate brief summary of the call, save it as PDF and upload it to the company cloud where it can be accessed by the next service tech if needed. And by the customer.

My physician does this routinely. Within 24 hours of a visit. It’s readily available, along with my lab and test results.

Time Travel: A History by James Gleick

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screen-shot-2016-10-05-at-12-01-53-pm“From the acclaimed author of The Information and Chaos, here is a mind-bending exploration of time travel: its subversive origins, its evolution in literature and science, and its influence on understanding time itself.”

Sleeping into the future is what we do every night.

“Man can do what he will, but he cannot will what he wills.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

“People living in different countries kill each other at irregular time intervals, so that also for this reason anyone who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror. I trust that posterity will read these statements with a feeling of proud and justified superiority.” — Albert Einstein’s message in the time capsule buried at the 1939 New York World’s Fair

We know that complete certainty must always elude us. We know that for certain.

“Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live.” — Albert Einstein

“I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything.” — Richard Feynman

What is time? Things change, and time is how we keep track.

Schopenhauer asserted that life and dreams are pages from the same book. To read them in their proper order is to live, but to browse among them is to dream.

No one can really explain how memories are formed and retrieved. Nor can anyone explain away Proust’s paradoxical contention: that the past cannot truly be recovered by searching our memories, by interrogating them, by rewinding the film or reaching back into the drawer; rather, that the essence of the past, when it comes to us at all,comes unbidden.

If you ever see yourself coming out of a time machine, run the other way as fast as you can. Nothing good can come from meeting yourself. — Charles Yu

We experience childhood one way when we’re living it and another way when we relive it in memory.

But if memory is the action of recollection, the act of remembrance, then it implies an ability to hold in the mind two constructs, one representing the present and another representing the past, and to compare them, one against the other. How did we learn to distinguish memory from experience?

Our conscious brains invent the concept of time over and over again, inferring it from memory and extrapolating from change. And time is indispensable to our awareness of self. […] You order the slices of your life. You edit the film even as it records.

“There were buttons and switches everywhere—buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature, and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.” — The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster

Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end.

“We know it all now, with our thoughts travelling at the speed of tweet. We are time travelers into our own future. We are Time Lords.” — Ali Smith

If we confuse the real world with our many virtual worlds, it’s because so much of the real world is virtual.

Time’s winged chariot isn’t taking us anywhere good. […] The past, in which we did not exist, is bearable, but the future, in which we will not exist, troubles us more.

“We perceive time only because we know we have to die.” — Heidegger

Officially a joke

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If the thing you care about most in the world is the opinion of others (especially celebrity others), I don’t know what could be worse than having a really smart, witty writer — who knows you — whip up on your ass. Graydon Carter in Vanity Fair:

“This ramshackle campaign, following a ramshackle business career, has exposed his flaws and failures to the world and, more importantly, to the people he will brush up against for the rest of his life. To them he is now officially a joke. I suspect he knows this. And if his thin skin on minor matters is any indication, he will be lashing out with even more vitriol. He is a mad jumble of a man, with a slapdash of a campaign and talking points dredged from the dark corners at the bottom of the Internet. I don’t think he will get to the White House, but just the fact that his carny act has gotten so far along the road will leave the path with a permanent orange stain. Trump, more than even the most craven politicians or entertainers, is a bottomless reservoir of need and desire for attention. He lives off crowd approval. And at a certain point that will dim, as it always does to people like him, and the cameras will turn to some other American novelty. When that attention wanes, he will be left with his press clippings, his dyed hair, his fake tan, and those tiny, tiny fingers.”

“A permanent orange stain.” Ouch. Not sure what this next bit says but it says… something.

“At one point we sent checks for $1.11 out to 58 of the “well-known” and “well-heeled” to see who would take the time to endorse and deposit the checks from a firm we called the National Refund Clearinghouse. The ones who deposited the $1.11 checks were sent 64-cent checks, and the ones who deposited those were sent checks for 13 cents. This being in the days before electronic deposits and such, the exercise took the better part of a year. At the end, only two 13-cent checks were signed—and we couldn’t believe our good fortune. One was signed by arms trader Adnan Khashoggi. The other was deposited by Donald Trump.”

And could there be a sadder, more depressing summary of the last fifteen years?

“It can reasonably be argued that the presidency of George W. Bush was an eight-year warm-up act for the final stage of a dumbed-down America: a Trump presidency. You can draw a relatively straight line from the Florida recount of 2000, which took Bush into office, right through to the shambolic Trump campaign. The election of Bush led to the invasion of Iraq, which led to the de-stabilization in the Middle East (Libya, Egypt, Syria), which led to the migrant crisis, which led to European nationalism, Brexit, and, at the tail end of all these disasters, Trump.”