The Echo in the Machine
Radiolab
05/23/25
•32m
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Today you can convert speech to text with the click of a button. Youtube does it for all our videos. Our phones will do it in real time. It’s frictionless. And yet, if it weren’t for an unlikely crew of protesters and office workers, it might still be impossible.
This week, the story of our attempts to make the spoken visible. The magicians who tried. And the crazy spell that finally did it.
EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Simon Adler
Produced by - Simon Adler
Original music from - Simon Adler
Sound design contributed by - Simon Adler
with mixing help from - Jeremy Bloom
Fact-checking by - Anna Pujol-Mazzini
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Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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