Can mobile phone message banks really turn voice into text? Some famous lines from the movies were played into a phone to find out

The service’s translations often run the gamut from confusing to amusing, so we thought we’d put it to the test with some well-known phrases from popular culture.

Famous lines from movies, politics and even the local train station were thrown into the service and what came out the other end was frequently amusing.

Tom Hanks’ Forrest Gump was a little confounded without anyone else’s help, but voice-to-text’s version of his well-worn line takes it to a whole new level.

Gump: “My mama always said life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”

Translation: “Oh mama it’s dad last we’d like a box of chocolate you never know what you doing again.”

In Star Wars, Han Solo’s comment, “Hey Luke, may the force be with you”, would have carried a little less weight if converted to text: “Hey Lou, we’re working with you.”

But at least the gist of the message was there, even if Luke Skywalker may have been miffed at being called Lou.

Other movie characters weren’t so lucky.

Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall, famously told his troops, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” in Apocalypse Now.

Voice-to-text’s version wasn’t quite as rousing: “Hey Les, Pete come in the morning.”

While the technology is developing at a rapid rate, we could still have decades of amusing/frustrating translations before our messages are relayed perfectly.

Queensland University of Technology speech expert David Dean said highly refined versions of the technology could take some time to make it to your mobile phone.

“Companies that have access to large amounts of audio data and the ability to work on them, like say Google, would be in the best place to get this technology working reliably,” Dr Dean said.

“In terms of the time line, I would say that there would be some examples that would be pretty good now, but to make it work out in the real world for everyone is probably, you’d say, 10 years away and then in 10 years’ time you’d still say 10 years away.”

Speaking clearly without any background noise would be your best bet for getting your message across, says Dr Dean.

But even then, the technology is restricted to the words in its pre-programmed dictionary, “so if you give your kid some weird name, it’s never going to be transcribed correctly”.

However he said the language models telcos use in the service could be geared to look for names, as that was something frequently left in a voice message.

“Names are pretty important to get correct because if you get an SMS and the name is wrong you’re going to have no idea who you’re having beers with.”

See: Brisbane Times