Back in 2010 Matt Thompson, then with National Public Radio, forecast in an op-ed that “at some point in the near future, automatic speech transcription will become fast, free, and decent.” He called that moment the “Speakularity,” in a sly reference to inventor Ray Kurzweil’s vision of the “singularity,” in which our minds will be uploaded into computers. And Thompson predicted that access to reliable automatic speech-recognition (ASR) software would transform the work of journalists—to say nothing of lawyers, marketers, people with hearing disabilities, and everyone else who deals in both spoken and written language.
