So the SpeechOcean guys form my last two voice acting jobs have been expanding what kinds of things they want their personal assistant type of entity to do. I thought it was going to be a Siri-esk voice controlled only sort of program but as I found out they also want it to read human handwriting. So last Monday, a friend of mine and I went over to their offices to do the other random tasks they want done. I was handed what looked like a large iPad and a stylus and was told to write down whatever the computer told me to. For example, the computer would display “A” and I would have to write “A” five times. This got a bit confusing when you had to write numbers; for example I accidently wrote “6” six times instead of five which apparently the computer wasn’t happy with. Another task was it would display a section of writing taken form a famous piece of English literature, like a random section of Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carrol, and was told to write that down. It is somewhat shocking how bad my handwriting looks when using the stylus thing. I think because there is less friction between the glass screen and the stylus as compared to a pen and paper it was very hard to actually write neatly, or what I describe as neatly. Furthermore, since there was so much to write I didn’t want to spend a significant period of time neatly writing each individual letter. I think they are teaching their computer program slightly wrong though, they wanted very specific characters sometimes. So for instance, in normal written English a dollar sign can be written with ether one or two lines going through the middle. They didn’t like the two line version I do so I had to rewrite it at the end. Since this is a common variation, it seems like anyone who writes a dollar sign with two middle liens will have quite a problem when trying to use their handwriting recognition tool. Normally here I would make a joke about the impending robot takeover but it feels like if the samples they are taking will be used for anything nefarious it will be Chinese government hacking, as one of my fellow handwriting samples joked. Some of the random strings of numbers we had to write seemed like they were trying to find someone whose handwriting was close enough to Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s so the Chinese Ministry of State Security can take control of the United States’ nuclear arsenal before the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service can get to it. Still, 200RMB is 200RMB even if I will eventually have to explain to the CIA why my handwriting was involved in a Chinese hacking scandal.
1 Comment
Dad
3/24/2017 08:43:04 pm
Funny that you are making money off your handriting. Penmanship (or stylus-manship) was never what I would consider your strongest suit. But, as you said, never look a gift horse in the mouth and keep away from Russian spies bearing bottles of Plutonium
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AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
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