I went for a walk and decided to use my technology to help me brainstorm ideas.
I opened up the notes app. I stuck my wireless headphones in my ears. I hit the transcribe button on the little virtual keyboard. And I started walking through the nature-adjacent path.
A lot of great ideas wound up in the little digital notepad.
And then also… a lot of weird broken ideas pulled from the blur of whatever happens when autocorrect meets ambient nature noises meets me failing to articulate my voice while talking to myself in the woods.
My phone tended to get my transcription brainstorming session about ninety percent right… and then seemed to hallucinate a few other things it must have thought I might have said.
One might think that this cause me to be upset, and sure, at first it kind of did.
But then a strange thing happened. A few—not all, but a few—of the typos and misheard corrections started making sense, and too, muddling serendipitously into interesting ideas.
It was nothing revolutionary. No. It was nothing deeply groundbreaking. Yet, somehow—whether is was some algorithm trying to make sense of my rambling ideating or just fortunate murmurings transcribed into something slightly better than gibberish—technology actually did slightly more than I expected when I asked it to help me brainstorm.
It became more than just a digital transcriptionist, it weighed in… perhaps accidentally, but also not lacking in value or merit either.