Hi Lindsay, it’s Bob!
The Siri speech to text feature on Apple’s iPhone is great. I use it all the time, primarily because my fingers are just too damn big for the iPhone’s tiny keyboard. I use it not only when posting, chatting, or emailing, but also to get my thoughts down while I’m walking. It’s convenient, of course, and pretty accurate. But sometimes I get crazy translations that make no sense.
One in particular really gets my goat: whenever I speak my wife’s name into the phone, 80% of the time it comes back with Lindsay instead of Lizzy. I’m positive it’s not my pronunciation. As a voiceover actor and audiobook narrator, with a thorough education in the art of elocution (thanks, Clyde Grigsby), as well as an obsession for proper diction, I know how to articulate into a microphone.
Also, I have no Lindsay in my life—not in my address book, or on Facebook, or anywhere in my vast digital universe. Lizzy, on the other hand, is everywhere. We chat a half dozen times a day, text and email each other constantly. Digitally speaking, my world is lousy with Lizzy!
And Lizzy is a much more common name than Lindsay. Indeed, babycenter.com ranks Lizzy 1,617 points higher than Lindsay in its list of popular baby girl names for 2021. On the Social Security Administration’s Top Names Over the Last 100 Years, Lindsay doesn’t even make the list. To be fair, neither does Lizzy, but as a diminutive of Elizabeth—ranked as the 4th most popular name—one can very easily conclude that Lizzy is much more pervasive than Lindsay. At least since 1922, anyway.
So why, then, would Siri, despite all the aforementioned evidence to the contrary, decide, “Wait a minute, he said Lizzy, but surely he must mean Lindsay”?
By the way, in a related side note, whenever Lizzy chats me up, she will often type bb, a shortcut of baby. But autocorrect will have none of that, thank you very much, and changes it to Bob. This has happened so many times, that now we just affectionately call each other Bob and Lindsay!
I guess I just don’t get why the dictation algorithm refuses to understand my pronunciation, especially since I took advantage of a feature on the iPhone that helps it do just that.
Open up the troublemaking name in your Contacts list, add a field called Phonetic First Name (or Phonetic Last Name, if necessary), and type in a phonetic version. Simple, right? For my daughter’s name—Amelie—I typed ah-muh-lee (that’s how we say it; the French say ah-may-lee). But regardless of how I wrap my lips, teeth, and tongue around the pronunciation, Siri manages to give me everything but: Emily—naturally—but also Amie Lee, Family, I’m Alli, I’m early, I’m only, and my all-time favorite, O’Malley. Really, Siri? O’Malley??!
And it’s not just names, of course. I once replied to a text message from Lindsay (ha!) using the dictation feature, and Siri mangled it so much it sounded like it was lifted straight out of a Nigerian prince’s email.
What I said:
Not sure I’m going to get to that because I’ll have my hands full.
What Siri heard:
North Shore program together because of all locations at school.
Well, of course that’s what I meant!
Anyway, I could go on with more speech-to-text hijinks, but you get the point. Besides, the internet is replete with enough click-bait, one-image-per-page slideshows of people’s autocorrect fails to last a lifetime.
And I don’t wish to give the impression I’m knocking it. This is a long, long way from the days of spitting your thoughts into a dictaphone and having your secretary type it up for you later. It’s a godsend for the disabled, who may not be able to type as well as they speak, and the genius of the programmers who created this remarkable technology sometimes borders on the mystical voodoo.
For example, try this little bit of Siri magic at home, kids. Grab your phone, open a text message or email, click the little microphone button on your phone's keyboard and say the following:
“I have Mrs. Blankenship for third period period”.
Go ahead. I’ll wait...
See what it did? It knew to spell out the first period and make the second period a period. That’s some spooky, throw-rocks-at-the-moon juju!
So, yeah, speech to text is pretty darn great. But, like any genius idea, it could still use some polishing. This was never clearer to me than when I recently used the dictation feature to text a friend, inviting him to lunch. As I spoke my final sentence, I decided it needed a bit of a punctuational flourish at the end to show my excitement at the prospect of our meeting. Without checking, I hit send, and this is what Siri wrote:
Can’t wait to see you X Lemay Chin Point
My friend texted back, accepted my invitation, and said:
“Don’t know who this X Lemay Chin Point fella is, but can’t wait to see you, too!”
