Man vs App on Jeopardy tonight.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by Alex

I saw an article that asked about speech recognition and the engineers said getting a adequate recognition capability is still a decade away.
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I think that's a bit pessimistic. For example, Vonage recently added visual voicemail (rather, they stopped charging extra for it), and it's been remarkably accurate in its transcriptions of voicemail messages. Considering the utter crap that I saw coming out of Google Voice's visual voicemail just a couple years ago, I find it hard to believe that it will take another decade to take care of the few minor issues. Perhaps processing speed is still an issue?

But let's assume the article is right and there really is still a big gap to traverse to get fast enough voice-to-text, how about visual processing? Just have Watson read the clue off the screen. My cheap-o scanner does darn good OCR, it couldn't be that difficult to get Watson to read the very legible Jeopardy board.