[TUHS] (no subject)

[Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu>]

>  Ken and Dennis were teaching [the Votrax] to swear

"Speak" being a phonetics-based program, I suspect they were exploring
multiple spellings. Out of context, lots of spellings were
indistinguishable. For example,
cheap, cheat, cheek, chief was hard to tell from cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep..

At the risk of repeating myself, the fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck example
came to the fore when a "speak" kiosk was installed at Epcot. PR folks
were worried that people would try it on bad words in this public
setting and asked me to block them. I said I'd block whatever words
they told me to. Duly, I was sent a list--on the letterhead of an AT&T
vice president. (Was that dictated to a secretary?)  Later I heard
that girls would often try friends' names, while boys would try bad
words and exclaim that the machine didn't know them. In fact, those
were among the few words the machine *did* know. Fortunately nobody
ever complained that I hadn't blocked misspellings.

Doug