Soda Craze

The cognitive-behavioral therapy I’m working through right now is all about memories, bad, the calling up of (and repair of delusional thinking regarding).  One worksheet I had to do the other day was about frustration.  “Describe a time that you felt frustration at a situation (not yourself or another person).”  I was like, Uh, my entire education? But frustration can be entertaining, let’s face it.  (‘Night at the Roxbury’!)

My brother and I were talking the other night before he left for the Toronto Design Show, and he brought up this speech-recognition software that a friend of his uses at school because of a learning disability that screws up his understanding of writing (I knew exactly what he was talking about because I used to scribe exams for students with that disability when I volunteered with SSDS), and then he was asking me about old text-to-speech programs and didn’t I think it was amazing how far they’d come.  “God, yes,” I said.  Frustrating?  I was remembering the stupid text-to-speech program we used to play with in grade 9.  An unnamed friend and I tried to teach it to sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ since we already knew you could change the tones of each syllable so it sounded like singing.  After about two weeks of work we ended up with “Happy (incorrect phoneme)day to (incorrect phoneme), happy (incorrect phoneme)” ad infinitum.  And totally out of tune, too.

We also tried to bother a friend of ours with a bunch of pre-written lines that we planned to play into the phone.  ‘Encyclopedia Salesman,’ I think we called it.  He was a good sport about it, but it took like a month to write the lines.

M:  Now put in “Sure, we have those.”
P:  OK… there.
Program: “Sewer, we hayev thoss.”
M:  What?  Try ‘haff.’
Program:  “Sewer, we haff thoss.”
P:  This is the stupidest thing in the world.
M: No it isn’t.  Try ‘thoes.’
Program:  “Sewer, we haff toes.”
P:  Did it just say ‘toes’?  Why is it saying ‘toes’?
M:  Minor setback, minor setback.
P:  Yeah, at least it’s saying ‘we’ right.
M:  Let me try something here…
Program: “Sewer, we haff thoooos.”
P:  Turn down the length!
M: It sounds better now, though.
P: It sounds stupid.
M: Why can’t it say ‘sure’?
P: It’s not a common word.
M: What?  Yes it is.  Why isn’t that in the memory?  Look, spell it differently.
Program: “Shower, we haff thoooos.”
P: Let’s give up.
M: No, no, it just needs the right spelling.
P: All right, let’s try…
Program: “Sore, we haff thoooos.”
M: ‘Sore’?  No, that’s nuts.  There’s got to be a way to spell it so it can say it.
P: No there doesn’t.  It just won’t say it.  How about we re-write the line?  We already know it says ‘Yes.’
M: Who says ‘yes’?  No, it’ll work with ‘sure.’
P: (typing)
Program: “Sir, we haff thoooos.”
M: I can’t even understand it any more.
P: Now can we give up?
M: No, no, let’s just leave it at ‘sewer’ and call Mirko already.
P: This is -
M: No it isn’t, and stop giggling, he’ll hear us!

Ah, the great days of my youth.