Re: Satellites and Your Privacy

Philip Chien (kc4yer@amsat.org)
Thu, 22 Apr 1999 14:26:19 -0400

>Philip Chien wrote:
>>
>> email sounds at least plausible - just search every bit transmitted in
>> every possible form (wire, fiber optic, R-F).  fax and voice are a little
>> harder to believe - for fax it would require incredible optical character
>> recognition capabilities and voice would require incredible pattern
>> recognition.  Certainly it's plausible to believe that the government would
>> have capabilities far in excess of what's available to the public.

Dave Mullenix <djmullen@facstaff.wisc.edu>

>Call the NorthWest Airlines reservation phone at 800 447-4747.  Their
>phone tag system says, "For information on a new reservation, press or
>say, 'One'."  It works, too.  You say "One" and you're switched to the
>proper level for the next round of phone tag.

There's several magnitudes of difference between recognising
speaker-independent individual words with a fairly small vocabulary and
actual normal conversations.

And speaker-independent speech detection has been around for a couple of
decades, and is available as a software package for most microcomputers.

When it's actually feasible for a computer to interpet the sentence "One
man won a one dollar bill for coming in first in the three legged race." or
tell the difference between a thousand speakers saying "Have a nice day"
and "Have an ice day" I'll be *very* impressed.



Philip Chien, KC4YER
Earth News
world (in)famous writer, science fiction fan, ham radio operator,
all-around nice guy, etc.