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May 2025
32m 42s

The Echo in the Machine

Wnyc Studios
About this episode

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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