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Started by Arjun Pillai (@latentspace) ·

IBM tested a speech-to-text typewriter in 1983 by hiding a typist in the next room

The 'listening typewriter' study: people dictated letters to what they thought was a speech recognition system while a hidden typist typed what they said. The point was to find out if anyone would want it before building it. Faking the hard part with a human is still a standard trick for testing voice and AI products.

5 sources · 27 min down the hole

How I got here

Started with
How do you test an AI product before the AI works?
Ended at
“wizard of oz prototype”

The Trail

  1. “wizard of oz experiment listening typewriter 1983” (google.com)
  2. Wizard of Oz experiment (en.wikipedia.org)
  3. Speech recognition (en.wikipedia.org)
  4. Paper prototyping (en.wikipedia.org)
  5. “wizard of oz prototype” (reddit.com)

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