???? – 2005murdered
Google Reader
“It fed us the internet one feed at a time, until Google decided we were full.”
“It learned your voice sentence by sentence, then fell quiet.”
IBM ViaVoice was a family of language-specific continuous speech recognition software that let you dictate straight into Microsoft Word — version 9.0 could pour your words onto the page directly. Loving it took commitment: enrollment meant reading hundreds of prepared sentences, an hour or more in installments, so the software could learn your voice and intonation.
Even corrections were part of the courtship — fixing a misheard word made the next attempt smarter. The final stable version was 9.0, and by its end the technology lived on mainly in embedded devices. When it was discontinued in 2005, it left behind a generation of users who had literally taught a machine to listen.
Spotted something wrong? Every fact on this page traces to a dated source. Fixes make the graveyard better for everyone.
“It fed us the internet one feed at a time, until Google decided we were full.”
“Tasman deserved better, and so did we.”
“Spotlight on, Dashboard glowing, gone before the Widgets even cooled”