[retrac]

> Machine translation is hilarious at best and dangerously wrong at worst.

I picked a random passage from a novel in French I am currently reading. ChatGPT translated the three paragraphs I ran it on correctly; there are no major quibbles to be had. It is good, coherent English, a correct translation, which closely follows the French original, even capturing some of the poetic imagery effectively.

I'm sure after another paragraph or two there will be a weird screw-up. And there's no consistency in a running translation of any length. Etc. Yes, it's not perfect. Not fully human-equivalent.

Still. I remember when machine translation like I just did was the realm of science fiction. And I thought it would remain science fiction for a long time. The fact that such a thing isn't mind-blowing shows how far things have come, hasn't it?

> Speech recognition - Siri still have major issues undestanding me.

I am using speech-to-text AI transcription every day. It's been revolutionary for me. I am hard of hearing. The cutting edge is Whisper, and it is leaps and bounds over the state-of-the-art just a year ago: https://github.com/openai/whisper