What Searchable Speech Will Do To You
We are going to start recording and automatically transcribing most of what we say. Instead of evaporating into memory, words spoken aloud will calcify as text, into a Record that will be referenced, searched, and mined. It will happen by our standard combination of willing and allowing. It will happen because it can. It will happen sooner than we think.
It will make incredible things possible. Think of all the reasons that you search through your email. Suddenly your own speech will be available in just the same way. “Show me all conversations with Michael before January of last year ... What was the address of that restaurant Mum recommended? ... When was the first time I mentioned Rob’s now-wife? ... Who was at that meeting again?” Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University and a co-author of a forthcoming book on evolutionary psychology, has speculated that we might all get in the habit of peppering our speech with keywords, to help us look it up later. Or, while you’re talking, a software agent could search your old conversations for relevant material. Details would come to your attention at just the moment that you needed them.
Much of what is said aloud would be published and made part of the Web. An unfathomable mass of expertise, opinion, wit, and culture—now lost—would be as accessible as any article or comment thread is today. You could, at any time, listen in on airline pilots, on barbershops, on grad-school bull sessions. You could search every mention of your company’s name. You could read stories told by father to son, or explanations from colleague to colleague. People would become Internet-famous for being good conversationalists. The Record would be mined by advertisers, lawyers, academics. The sheer number of words available for sifting and savoring would explode—simply because people talk a lot more than they write.
With help from computers, you could trace quotes across speakers, or highlight your most common phrases, or find uncommon phrases that you say more often than average to see who else out there shares your way of talking. You could detect when other people were recording the same thing as you—say, at a concert or during a television show—and automatically collate your commentary.
You’d think we were a strange species, if you listened to the whole of humanity’s recorded corpus today.
Bill Schilit, a Googler who did early work mining the Google Books corpus, suggested that you could even use quotations to find connections between scientific subjects. “In science you have this problem that the same thing is called different names by different people; but quotations tend to bridge the nomenclature between disciplines,” he said. He described a project where Google: what it meant to different authors, what writers in different disciplines called the same thing.
