The Echo in the Machine

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

Science, Natural Sciences, History, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.6 • 43.5K Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today you can convert speech to text with the click of a button. Youtube does it for all our videos. Our phones will do it in real time. It’s frictionless. And yet, if it weren’t for an unlikely crew of protesters and office workers, it might still be impossible. This week, the story of our attempts to make the spoken visible. The magicians who tried. And the crazy spell that finally did it. Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Wait, you're listening.
0:03.1	Okay.
0:04.4	All right.
0:05.6	Okay.
0:07.0	All right.
0:08.5	You're listening to Radio Lab.
0:11.4	Radio Lab.
0:11.9	From W. N. Y.
0:13.9	See?
0:14.9	Yeah.
0:19.2	So, let me just, we are recording good.
0:22.7	This is Radio Lab.
0:23.8	I'm Lulu Miller.
0:24.7	And today, producer Simon Adler, brings us a story from?
0:29.7	My mother's living room watching the television with her.
0:34.2	This is what we love in our reporting.
0:36.5	They scour the earth far and wide. Oh yeah,
0:39.7	going to unknown, exciting places like the shag carpeted living room of my mother. No, and so we're
0:46.4	sitting there and, you know, my mother's hearing. It's not what it once was. And so like most nights,
0:51.9	she was watching with the closed captioning on.
0:55.0	Oh, absolutely same. All right on.
0:58.0	Anyhow, I think it was the local news, literally talking about things like filling up potholes.
	...

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