LinLog

Pro-tip: the voice recognition feature on your phone is not as smart as you.

Here's the situation: I was reading a political philosophy article that was discussing some ideas of Karl Marx because I was a philosophy major and this is the sort of thing we do in our free time.  Anyway, for some reason I wanted to look up the term "bourgeoisie".  The article didn't use that term, but it came to mind and I wanted to see if my understanding of how Marx used it was correct.  So I started typing the word into Duck Duck Go on my phone and suddenly realized - I don't know how to spell it.  (In my own defense, the word originates in French, which is notorious for spelling things in a way that is not intuitive to native English speakers.  Especially the ones who don't speak French.)

So, being a card-carrying computer geek, what do I do?  In a fit of blind optimism, even though I know better, I push the "microphone" button on my virtual keyboard!  I might not know how to spell "bourgeoisie", but I do know how to pronounce it.  Why struggle trying to figure out the spelling when I can just say it and let Android do the spelling for me?

Yeah, that didn't go so well.  Apparently Google voice control doesn't even know that word.  I tried several times and the closest it got was the quasi-phonetic spelling "booshwazee".  Although, oddly enough, searching Duck Duck Go for "booshwazee" actually does show the results for "bourgeoisie".  So in that sense, I guess it did work.  Kind of.  But not really.

Moral of the story: don't count on your apps to be more literate than the average user, especially in a multi-lingual context.  In retrospect, this should have been obvious.  What was I thinking?