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aprilthird2021

I mean, if you are willing to accept mistakes, then a lot of this was doable a while ago. Google Translate has been around a long time (and it's improved due to transformers but it was pretty good a long time ago too). Wikipedia has been around forever. Siri and other such agents have been doing audio transcription well long before.

So all of these have improved. But they aren't completely novel

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There were shareware Windows programs for audio transcription and even controlling the computer with your voice back in the 90s, I had some fun playing with one of them around 1999/2000. You had to train it to your voice by reading some text it gave you, but after that was pretty good. The modern stuff is definitely better untrained, but I'm not so sure about after training, though it has been a long time since I've used it.

Yeah I remember discovering the voice controls built into Windows Vista when I was a kid and being blown away by it.

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