Hook it up to a speech synthesizer, to make Deep Scat!<p>I played around with looping different speech synthesizers back into different speech recognizers, kind of like audio or video feedback, but with chaotic noise injected like quirks of the synthesizer, the voice, speech speed and pitch, and the audio environment around the microphone (you could talk over it to interfere with the words it was speaking and lay down new words in the loop), working against the lawful pattern matching and error correction behavior of the speech recognizer, and the HMM language model it was trained with.<p>It was a lot like beat poetry, in that it tended to rhyme and have the same number of syllables and use plausible sounding sequences of words that didn't actually make any sense, like Sarah Palin.<p>You can start it out with a sensible sentence, and it will play the telephone game, distorting it again and again. If you slow down the speech rate, words will split into more words or syllables, and if you speed it up, words will collapse into fewer words or syllables, or you can tune the speech rate to maintain the same number of syllables. Its analogous to zooming the video camera in and out with video feedback.<p>It would wander aimlessly randomly around poetic landscapes, sometimes falling into strange attractors in the speech recognizer's hidden markov model and repeating itself with little or no variation.<p>At any time you can join in with your own voice and add words during the pause at the end of the loop, or talk over its voice, much the way you can hold things in front of the camera during video feedback to mix them in.<p>Different speech recognizers are better at recognizing different vocabularies, and therefore like to babble about different topics, depending on which data they were trained on, which we could guess by attepmting to psychoanalyze their incoherent babbling.<p>IBM's ViaVoice was apparently trained on a lot of newspaper articles about the Watergate hearings, as it was quite paranoid, but business like, as if it were dictating a memo, and would start chanting and fixating on phrases like "congressional investigation," and "burglary and wiretapping," and "convicted of conspiracy".<p>Microsoft's speech recognizer had obviously been trained on newspaper articles about the Clinton Lewinsky scandal, since it was quite obsessed with repeatedly chanting about blow jobs (just like the news of the time), and whenever you mentioned Clinton this or Clinton that, it would rapidly converge on Clinton Lewinsky, Clinton presidency, Clinton impeachment, etc.<p>What I'd love to have would be a speech recognizer that returns a pitch envelope and timing that you could apply back on the synthesized words, then it could sing to you!