Microsoft Office learns IPA?

From Kie Zuraw: Phonolist has been a serious forum, but in the spirit of the old days of Phonoloblog, where miscellaneous phonological observations shared space with weightier matters, here is the first–and most frivolous–in a short series of posts from me.

The other day, I started typing Wagner lyrics, in IPA, into Microsoft Word for a phonetics class exercise.* Imagine how impressed I was when this alert popped up:

Could Word read IPA now? My amazement faded after I’d typed another couple of lines:

Just a lucky guess then, but it does make me wonder what the MS language detection software is doing.
* The exercise was to circle consonants with various places of articulation and then spot them in an MRI video of Michael Volle singing “Oh Du, mein holder Abendstern”–hence the operatic alveolar trills.

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