Someone emailed me with what she thought was a typo in one of my Success Store products.

While it turned out there wasn’t any error, I definitely appreciated the kindness of her effort to alert me.

Other things have gotten past us before and it never hurts to double-check. Those extra eyeballs are much appreciated!

One of the reasons she alerted me was because the word in question was flagged by the spell-check feature in Word.

This got me to thinking about why technology can never replace the human brain.

Take biz card readers, for example. They’re neat and all, but they still require a human being to go through and make sure all the data converted over correctly and got inputted to the right fields.

Same thing with voice recognition software. There are folks out there who think that technology will make it so they never need another transcriber or proofreader again. They could not be more wrong.

While the technology is pretty darn nifty and can be applied in all kinds of situations, there isn’t a voice recognition program out there that doesn’t still require an actual human being with a firm command of language to make sure everything was transcribed, spelled, punctuated and formatted correctly.

Only a human being will know how to correct incomplete sentences and make sure all grammar rules are correctly applied.

Plus, like in this instance, just because a program like Word flags something doesn’t mean it’s incorrect. It takes a human being to know better.

The human brain has job security!

Because only the human brain can distinguish between contexts and apply critical thinking.

Technology can’t do that. It can’t think like a person, and it doesn’t have a human being’s ability for discernment.

Language and communication are the heart of everything we do in business. Which is why it’s imperative that administrative support experts have a firm knowledge and command of these things.