After all the bad things have been said about Vista, it contains one redeeming feature: an excellent speech recognition program. It has been an interesting experience training this software to recognize my voice. I have a very slight but recognizable accent. Vista, naturally, has been a trained to the American voice. It has difficulty with my slightly British enunciation.
The implications of this are rather interesting. I ask myself how often I listen to someone speaking and interpret what they say through my own training and experience. How many times when I think I have understood them, when I have been fully attending to what they have said, even when I have been using every tool in the active listening toolbox, have I misunderstood them based on my own projections?
I am convinced that we do this all the time, even with the best of intentions. Of course, it is the nature of the human brain to work this way. This ability to learn and extrapolate from what we have learned is the nature of intelligence. Without it we would not be the species we are today.
So what do we do with this listening challenge? What can we learn from it? I suppose the answer for me, is to remember to be humble. To not get caught in my own arrogance: to remember, always, that even when I am bringing all my skill, training, and innate abilities to bear on the situation, that nothing I think I understand from another can ever truly be exactly as I understand it.
Not to say that I cannot learn from it, it’s just that I must be careful about making assumptions. For assumptions are only ourselves projected back onto another. So when we hear ourselves saying “That person is…” or “I know for sure that…” perhaps we should ask “Do we really?”
We shape computers to think like us. We shape language, and even, arguably, the practice of science, to reflect and frame our understanding of the world. As humans, we love categorizing, labeling, and putting things in little boxes. The trick to really being open, the trick to genuine learning, is to know the limitations of our own efforts to put things in boxes. In that way, we use our humanity to be more than our inventions and our systems ever can be.
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