Some of you may recall awhile back my inquiry regarding voice recognition software. No one on this site had any experience with that, but my research led me to purchase an excellent program called Dragon Naturally Speaking. This software allows you to "train" your computer to recognise your voice and transcibe it into text. The software is incredibly accurate, around 95 to 98% accurate the first few times I used it, and it continues to improve with use. However, the errors in recognition that it does make can be very funny at times. So many words in the English language sound similar and that can confuse the software. Most of the time I just get a good chuckle, but yesterday one of the mistakes was eerily funny.
I was dictating a passage from an excellent book I'm reading, "Man's Search For Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. The original passage says this: "One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment."
The software got the entire passage correct exact for the phrase in the last sentence, "to carry out". Imagine my surprise when the following words popped onto the screen instead: "to kill a cult".