I am not joking when I say that the autocomplete on the Microsoft HD Zune in 2010 is the single best autocorrect implementation that I have EVER experienced. You could half pay attention to a conversation, hit the right QUARTER of the keyboard with your giant thumb, and it would ALWAYS guess right. It was literally magic, in a way that no technology I have experienced has compared to.
Meanwhile, my modern "AI" based Google keyboard autocorrect can't even handle the average case where only the first letter of the word was a mistake. It will only suggest corrections (and then auto-choose those corrections based on rules that change monthly it seems) that use the same first letter that I accidentally hit.
Also, my mother had a dirt cheap LG flip-phone in 1998 that, after 10 minutes of training, could dial any number and even dial any of your contacts by name with your voice.
In the mid-2000s, Microsoft had a BUILT IN function to Windows XP for dictation. You can see it do poorly in a demo, which is funny, but in actual use, without any cheating or prompting or massive compute resources, it correctly understood you 80% of the time. The state of the art in the industry could do much better than that without "AI" at the time, and cost a pretty penny for people with disabilities mostly. However, that dictation API is STILL IN WINDOWS, Microsoft just kinda hides it because they want you to use the Azure based one. It is super simple, with a powerful yet understandable API, available to any application that runs on Windows (like, say, games) and completely free to use. More importantly, if you have ANY knowledge about the expected use case for your app, you can feed the dictation engine an easy to generate "grammar" about the structure of commands, and it's accuracy can jump up to near perfection. When I played with it, I was able to build a voice controlled app with a single page of code and like an afternoon that easily turned my voice into text. It was literally harder to control the legacy Win32 APIs to inject input into queues for my use case: Voice controlled game input.
Meanwhile, my modern "AI" based Google keyboard autocorrect can't even handle the average case where only the first letter of the word was a mistake. It will only suggest corrections (and then auto-choose those corrections based on rules that change monthly it seems) that use the same first letter that I accidentally hit.
Also, my mother had a dirt cheap LG flip-phone in 1998 that, after 10 minutes of training, could dial any number and even dial any of your contacts by name with your voice.
In the mid-2000s, Microsoft had a BUILT IN function to Windows XP for dictation. You can see it do poorly in a demo, which is funny, but in actual use, without any cheating or prompting or massive compute resources, it correctly understood you 80% of the time. The state of the art in the industry could do much better than that without "AI" at the time, and cost a pretty penny for people with disabilities mostly. However, that dictation API is STILL IN WINDOWS, Microsoft just kinda hides it because they want you to use the Azure based one. It is super simple, with a powerful yet understandable API, available to any application that runs on Windows (like, say, games) and completely free to use. More importantly, if you have ANY knowledge about the expected use case for your app, you can feed the dictation engine an easy to generate "grammar" about the structure of commands, and it's accuracy can jump up to near perfection. When I played with it, I was able to build a voice controlled app with a single page of code and like an afternoon that easily turned my voice into text. It was literally harder to control the legacy Win32 APIs to inject input into queues for my use case: Voice controlled game input.