There are three related functions which I enjoy: spellcheckers, voice recognition and optical character recognition. Because they are amazing? No. Because they never work? No. It is because they often give birth to ideas. Maybe the ideas are not always of profound value, but at least some of them engender a chuckle. I was pondering all this because I had been wrestling to OCR a 60-year old typescript, typed on foolscap flimsy with a typewriter which positioned many of the characters where it felt like it. The sentence which I enjoyed most, was "Carlton slept in a very fine haddock". I'm not sure this discord of images has any mileage, notwithstanding ideas of beds being smoked or unsmoked, dyed or natural and the tale of the Princess and the fish bone. After wasting some time tweaking the scanned images, it was time for coffee and a new approach: voice recognition. Years ago I used occasionally to use DNS quite happily, but decided to try the software built into Vista. I trained it, trained it further and started. For your delectation, here is a short extract:

Dried Ends Delight

He cried to drag ends many of you have had asked before, when bending in their dressing gowns over the guests us toast in their tiny kitchen, in the middle of the night. And it altogether with showgirl.  A clonard that we can all but I just as much as we like, every one South Carolina mind turns to sweet off. I’ve invented by something of false start them it’s a new kind of sweet! I know they were danced he is making them goal stop the at least a day when trying her.  A bowl!  It was just had to exciting.  The kitchen was fault of us also the dotted here and there are Witherspoon close off the mixture boat out for tasting a false start it also had burnt his tongue or a three times already, so keep was just staring now, well Percy hired a boat from store cupboard to stoat with nothing after another in his claws.

A clonard? Clonard is in fact a real place, but here it could be a vagrant, a down-on-his-luck clone from a future book. The ability to switch minds to 'sweet on' and 'sweet off' could be a major advance in obesity. At that point I decided to use an HRI, or Human Recognition Interface, as we term eyes, brain and fingers on a keyboard. I don't repeat these tales to poke fun at the deficiencies, but to point to yet another source of inspiration from the Prince of Serendip, another accidental clash of words. And what of the old typescript? That will be available soon as "Dragons' Delight"; although I'm still a little tempted by "Dried Ends Delight" 🙂