I don't really go to church in summer. My mother didn't insist on it when school was out, and I never formed the habit. But since I'm going to blog for the OBUC website from time to time I thought perhaps I should find out what happens here at this time of year, and I came this Sunday.
Since I would be blogging, I thought I should take a few notes, and as Gaye told the children’s story, I began typing into my iPhone. (The story was from Nehemiah. The Israeliteshave gotten very tired of building the temple, so Ezra comes out and reads to them from the sacred bookall morning, and they are heartened and encouraged. Which, ahem, is already an answer to the question "why should I be coming to church on Sundays even in summer?")
It's hard to thumb-type on a tiny iPhone screen and still pay attention, though, and halfway through thumbing in the word “discouragement” I thought of using Apple's voice transcription software, "Siri", instead.
When Siri is turned on, it interprets whatever sounds it hears as being spoken English, and transcribes as best it can. Naturally the results aren't perfect. It works best if you use it in a quiet environment with the phone about 3 inches from your lips, but even then it will misinterpret words, leave out whole phrases, or give up entirely. Extraneous noise confuses it terribly. I was sitting a fair distance from the front, and there was quite a lot of ambient noise - people rustling, children moving around, a piano accompaniment, and the church acoustics reflecting it all - so I wasn't expecting much.
I turned Siri on and let it run for a sentence or two of Gaye’s story, then paused it so it could process. Siri thought it over for a few seconds and produced this transcript:
I love you
These words were not part of Gaye’s story. This was how Siri interpreted, in English, all the sounds of the church on Sunday: Gaye speaking, the music, the children rustling, and all of us, listening or praying or enjoying the sun coming through the windows, or even playing with our iPhones.
Like so many miracles, this has a perfectly natural explanation, and interpretation is up to the observer. For me, I would say that Siri was listening to everything, and the real message got through.
