Here’s an interesting post from John Crowley about voice recognition software and its persistent attempts to turn sounds into words. Scroll down through the comments until you get to his response, where he gives an example:
“I haven’t captured any yet. But back when I was using Dragon Naturally Speaking I was pausing for thought and on the screen there appeared a single word I had not spoken:
woman
I marveled at that, erased it, went on working; at another pause it wrote, all by itself:
womb
At which point I began to wonder, sort of freak out in fact; and later it asked:
whom?
Well whom indeed? I pondered all these things for a day, until at length I noticed — my office then was right on a main road — that trucks going by at certain hours made a certain sound… and yes it could be seen that they were being picked up. Why THOSE words, though, just for ME?…”