Friday, December 19, 2008
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Monday, December 1, 2008
Correctional Chagrin
A few months ago I was assigned by my supervisor to test out some new software. It was voice-recognition software that Corrections was considering purchasing for the entire department.
I plugged the headset into my computer and put in the disc. The installation was pretty easy, but then I was prompted by the software to read a few different things. Apparently, the software can "learn" how you speak after a certain amount of time. I got pretty excited as I looked through the options of things to read aloud. I clicked on a Dave Barry article.
Dave Barry is a humor columnist that I read religiously when I was in Jr. High and High School.
I started reading the article as I watched the voice-recognition software translate my words almost instantly onto my computer screen. Unfortunately, the more I read, the funnier the article became and I started laughing a lot between words and sentences. The software did a pretty good job, though, and most of my embarrassment came from all of my co-workers in surrounding cubicles who were listening to everything I was saying (at the time I was working out of South Salt Lake Police Department and my cubicle was surrounded by SSL detectives).
After the software "learned" my voice I decided to try it out in a real application. I opened a report I had been writing on a new offender who was in jail waiting to be sentenced. The report I was working on is called a Pre Sentence Investigation Report. It's pretty much a biography of the bad guy... in brief.
Well, most of the information is technical court stuff with lots of numbers and symbols and the formatting is kind of weird so I decided to do all of that by hand. I didn't want to waste a bunch of time trying to figure out how it worked with the software. The first opportunity I had to actually read something aloud and have it transcribed for me happened to be the "Defendant's Version" of the offense. This is where the bad guy writes out his version of the crime and talks about how he feels about it.
I don't know why I didn't think about what I was doing before I did it. I turned on the microphone and started to read the handwritten statement by the defendant. Keep in mind that I'm trying to speak at a good volume and enunciate my words so the software can keep up. It started something like this (spelling, grammar and punctuation have been corrected for your benefit), "On April Sixteenth two thousand and seven I was drinking at my girlfriends house. Some of her friends came by while she was at work and they brought something that looked like tobacco and said we should smoke it."
At this point I started to realize what the other detectives might be thinking. A couple of them know that I'm trying out software, but most of them don't. To them, it probably just sounded like I was on the phone with somebody.
"We all smoked it together and then all of her friends left. I think I fell asleep on the couch for a while, but then Paula started crying. I remembered that I was babysitting for my girlfriend so I went to check on her."
All of a sudden, I realize that I'm typing this report on a sex offense. I consider for a second that I should stop and finish later... maybe when no one was around. But if I was really going to use this software, then I couldn't be shy about it. I mean, this is how it was gonna be in my office day in and day out.
"I went into her room and she had kicked her covers off and she told me she was cold." Ok... you know what... I'm not gonna type the rest of it, but you can imagine the direction this is going. I read the entire thing and I can hear people gasping and walking over to my cubicle when I was about halfway through.
It was actually good that the software was accustomed to hearing me laugh while reading because I laughed through the whole last half when I realized most of the detectives were standing behind me by the time I finished.
That's the end of my story. Oh yeah... the guy went to jail for year. That's it.
I plugged the headset into my computer and put in the disc. The installation was pretty easy, but then I was prompted by the software to read a few different things. Apparently, the software can "learn" how you speak after a certain amount of time. I got pretty excited as I looked through the options of things to read aloud. I clicked on a Dave Barry article.
Dave Barry is a humor columnist that I read religiously when I was in Jr. High and High School.
I started reading the article as I watched the voice-recognition software translate my words almost instantly onto my computer screen. Unfortunately, the more I read, the funnier the article became and I started laughing a lot between words and sentences. The software did a pretty good job, though, and most of my embarrassment came from all of my co-workers in surrounding cubicles who were listening to everything I was saying (at the time I was working out of South Salt Lake Police Department and my cubicle was surrounded by SSL detectives).After the software "learned" my voice I decided to try it out in a real application. I opened a report I had been writing on a new offender who was in jail waiting to be sentenced. The report I was working on is called a Pre Sentence Investigation Report. It's pretty much a biography of the bad guy... in brief.
Well, most of the information is technical court stuff with lots of numbers and symbols and the formatting is kind of weird so I decided to do all of that by hand. I didn't want to waste a bunch of time trying to figure out how it worked with the software. The first opportunity I had to actually read something aloud and have it transcribed for me happened to be the "Defendant's Version" of the offense. This is where the bad guy writes out his version of the crime and talks about how he feels about it.
I don't know why I didn't think about what I was doing before I did it. I turned on the microphone and started to read the handwritten statement by the defendant. Keep in mind that I'm trying to speak at a good volume and enunciate my words so the software can keep up. It started something like this (spelling, grammar and punctuation have been corrected for your benefit), "On April Sixteenth two thousand and seven I was drinking at my girlfriends house. Some of her friends came by while she was at work and they brought something that looked like tobacco and said we should smoke it."
At this point I started to realize what the other detectives might be thinking. A couple of them know that I'm trying out software, but most of them don't. To them, it probably just sounded like I was on the phone with somebody."We all smoked it together and then all of her friends left. I think I fell asleep on the couch for a while, but then Paula started crying. I remembered that I was babysitting for my girlfriend so I went to check on her."
All of a sudden, I realize that I'm typing this report on a sex offense. I consider for a second that I should stop and finish later... maybe when no one was around. But if I was really going to use this software, then I couldn't be shy about it. I mean, this is how it was gonna be in my office day in and day out.
"I went into her room and she had kicked her covers off and she told me she was cold." Ok... you know what... I'm not gonna type the rest of it, but you can imagine the direction this is going. I read the entire thing and I can hear people gasping and walking over to my cubicle when I was about halfway through.
It was actually good that the software was accustomed to hearing me laugh while reading because I laughed through the whole last half when I realized most of the detectives were standing behind me by the time I finished.
That's the end of my story. Oh yeah... the guy went to jail for year. That's it.
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