Circa 1999, when our boys were in school, we discovered that the iMac could turn speech into text. And the achievement was amazing, in a primitive sort of way. The iMac was a sluggish computer by today's standards, and IBM's ViaVoice program was freestanding, using only the algorithms stored on floppy disks, with no access to online algorithms.
We took turns reading aloud sections from The Three Musketeers, Tom Swift, and The Boxcar Children to see what would happen.
ViaVoice made a heroic effort. A 1994 IBM factsheet claimed its software could render speech with complete accuracy. Well, no. It did turn out authentic words, and sometimes the sentences were grammatically correct, but the meaning rarely carried through.
Fed a line about somebody liking to eat ice cream, ViaVoice returned with "Islam is a beautiful blue dream."
We liked that phrase, and lately I fed it into DALL-E-2. Here's the result of the computers' unlikely partnership:
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