I made a strange and Yuri discovery last night. As I dictate these postings my voice is being recorded and the recordings are being archived by Google. I saw an article on CNET about how Google saves sounds of your voice issuing commands and interacting with Google Voice Search on your phone, but I did not think much of it because I never do that. So I was surprised to check my account and discover over a year’s worth of audio in which I am speaking in a deliberate staccato voice, annunciating words clearly so that they will be transcribed accurately, and speaking punctuation marks. It’s a very strange sounding voice and it’s a little eerie to have discovered what amounts to on audio museum. I am a little miffed to that there seems to be no way for me to download it should I want to use this stuff for my own purposes. I did not know that they were allowed to intercept dictation and memos and such which are spoken into applications not developed by them. That’s a little scary. Google is intercepting and recording all of my outgoing text messages, and everything that I speak into this text editor. Come to think of it I wonder if it is not trying to transcribe what does into the voice recorder, I never use that for voice I just use it for ambient sound. I will try a recording later and see if it shows up in my archive. The funny thing is that I actually thought the dragon app was handling dictation and transcription, & I thought I had found an efficiency by bypassing the actual recording of audio and going straight to text. Now I have to make sure they were not recording my phone calls. The outgoing text messages is pretty embarrassing or could be., it does not really make sense that they would intercept phone calls or voice recorders stuff, since there should be no text dictation conversion going on, but I wouldn’t put it past them to accidentally or clandestinely do something like that.
Sharon Ridley, “stay awhile with me”. That is a beautiful song.
It is a wild later, I sent up a couple of audio to see this Google intercept it. I kind of doubt it but you never know. I am listening to music on my iPod, using the cheap set of noise canceling headphones I found in the closet. They are not as good as the Bose but not bad either. I am listening to the soulful 70’s which was a multi CD set that was wildly popular on Usenet a bunch of years ago. I never listen to to a fraction of the crap I downloaded also use net back in the day, so I guess I am catching up today.
I actually remembered exactly why I wanted to come out here today and I am glad I did. I wanted to get more details on a particular tombstone that I photographed years ago. Somebody landed on my website after typing that person’s name into some search engine. So if somebody out there is researching this person then maybe they are interesting. I did not get complete photos of the tombstone, only one name, and I wanted to get the rest of the names so I just did that. I will look this family up later, I think they were very successful in the clothing trade in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
It really is beautiful out here today, and listening to music over the headphones makes this a completely different experience than I usually have when I come here. It is actually kind of ludicrous to be in this space listening to some music or as I was earlier Miles Davis cellar door sessions. It’s just ludicrous in a way I can’t quite articulate.
Listening now to a song called 18 with a bullet. It sounds like a romantic do what kind of song but it is basically about a guy getting ready to kill his wife / girlfriend. Soul music is weird like that.
