Computer scientist Jeffrey Bigham has created a speech-recognition program that combines the best talents of machines and people.

Though voice recognition programs like Apple’s Siri and Nuance’s Dragon are quite good at hearing familiar voices and clearly dictated words, the technology still can’t reliably caption events that present new speakers, accents, phrases, and background noises. People are pretty good at understanding words in such situations, but most of us aren’t fast enough to transcribe the text in real time (that’s why professional stenographers can charge more than $100 an hour). So Bigham’s program Scribe augments fast computers with accurate humans in hopes of churning out captions and transcripts quickly.