Auto Correct for Speaking

           You'd think with Artificial Intelligence they’d have thought of everything, right?  Then riddle me this: Why aren’t people more intelligent? I wouldn’t even care if it was artificial.

          In fact, I’d like to volunteer to become more intelligent. Maybe they can use me to invent Auto Correct for Speaking.

          Oh, sure, we all gripe about what auto correct does to our texts. It changes “I will call you” to “I will claw you” and “His wife is Morgan” to  “His wife is Morbid,” forcing us to scan every word we speak before we press “send.” I’ve blogged about the horrors of auto-correct here and here.

          But I need this for my mouth. Just this week I heard a man speak, detected an accent, and happily asked what country he’s from. Ah, but he was born here. What he had was a speech impediment!  Yes, I am still embarrassed for being such a clod.

          Then I gushed over someone new, only to discover we had already met.  She frowned; obviously she hadn’t made much of an impression. I felt terrible. Remiss. Thoughtless. Stupid.

          So either I need a time machine so I can go back for two minutes and avoid such blunders, or I need to have more intelligence so I don’t make them in the first place.

However, you can watch my wonderful life hacks here, which (I hope) do not contain any foot-in-mouth examples.

Like Adding Gasoline to the Fire

          Well, it had to happen. With all this social distancing, we’re texting and Zooming more than ever.  And this means the odds of sending a message before reviewing it have just gone up. You guessed it—we’ve added another dreadful auto-correct problem to our arsenal of embarrassing tech moments.

          This time Bob was dictating a text to his doctor’s office about a basal-cell spot on the side of his nose. And here is what they read:

          “I’m keeping gasoline on it for comfort.”

          Yep, and you thought you’d heard every old wives’ tale about cures and remedies.

          No sooner had he sent it along than he read it, cringed, and called the office where a woman, laughing hysterically, answered the phone. He explained  that he meant Vaseline and she understood.

          But I’m still betting that text went viral.

In between reading my books, check out this blog post about another horrendous text Bob sent to a law enforcement officer. But of course.

The Death of Enunciation

          Well, it has finally happened.  Clear speech is being trained out of us by the dictation feature of our cell phones. We already know that no matter how distinctly you speak into that device, it will come out, “You are the breast!” and worse (see my blog about St. Bob’s blunder here).

          But now we have to slur what we’re saying just to get the correct words to appear on our screen.  If I say “question mark” it does not place a ? at the end of my sentence.  It spells out question mark.  If I want it to actually use the ? symbol, I have to hurry along and say, “Queshamark.”

          And if I want it not to write out exclamation mark, but to print ! I must say, “exlamashamark.” And if I want extra ones it sounds like I’m drunk, cursing, and hacking up a hairball. Make that hairball !!!

Elocution teachers must be turning in their graves.  And then, when you don’t want a punctuation symbol, it gives you one, anyway.  As a substitute high school teacher I dictated, “I’m teaching first period” and it came out, “I’m teaching first.”  And when I wanted to commiserate with a friend who couldn’t get a response from HR I said, “It’s like they’re in a coma,” but it came out, “It’s like there in a ,” with “they’re” misspelled as well.

What if you’re making a list and you want to say, “Here’s what to pack:”?  It will say, “Here’s what to pack colon”.

If you say, “Quotation mark” it will write that out.  You have to say, “Quote” to actually get a quotation mark.  But then how can you say, “I’d like to quote you”? It comes out, “I’d like to “ you.”

And all this extra back-spacing and correcting is eating up our time! So, no offense, but I have to --.

Have you ever scrolled through my blog posts?  Give it a try; hilarity has been happening for years.