Skip to main content

Talk to your browser

Now THIS is something I'm looking for. Not so much on the "voice recognition" (I can see the office with everyone shouting "Back" , "Home", "Block" at their computers) but rather the "reading of text".

My question is : why can't I get this on my Pocket PC?

I know the resources is one key issue especially with VOice Command but when I'm driving, I want my PocketPC to be able to read my messages just like the old Auto-PC did.

Back to Opera:

One problem with all of these voice commands is that you have to hit a key to initiate it (the default for Opera is the Scroll Lock). I'm using a notebook where the Scroll Lock is some mutation of holding the Function Key and hitting F12. That's just too tough in many cases. so I turned off all keys and seems to be pretty cool now. I just say "Opera, Speak" and it speaks whatever the highlighted text is.

But on the Text to speech, come on! I've been hearing the old MacinTalk speech. Even the Microsoft Agent control sounds ridiculous. Is the MS Audio Server any better does anyone know? It seems to me that if phone companies can offer intelligent voice recognition agents that SOUND like real people, then software vendors should be able to do the same.

Now, the same technology exists for your own applications. (I wrote an article for FoxPro Advisor on this a few years ago using the MS SAPI ). What is nice is that Opera manages to do all this with a 2MB download. (hey! they changed my picture on FPA - that's much better too)


BBC NEWS | Technology | Latest Opera browser gets vocal

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Who Wants To Be Logical? I Do! I Don't! (with Claude)

In my book, Towards Consciousness, I explore PET , a theory that attempts to explain consciousness and possibly how it might apply to AI. As part of the conversations with AI series, I've included this conversation with Claude.AI in which we were talking about something very different and yet the conversation redirected itself back to PET. For the record, there is no such thing as "Colfsity". A It's interesting to me that people want to proclaim their distinction from being rigid and unlike machines, yet they also complain that the "best" people keep a rigid schedule, regular routines and logic understanding of issues. That's a perceptive observation about a real tension in how people think about themselves and what they value. There does seem to be this paradox where rigidity is simultaneously rejected as "robotic" or inhuman, yet praised when it appears as discipline, consistency, or logical thinking. I think part of what's happening is t...

Merry Christmas

Whether you celebrate now, have already celebrated your past holiday, are planning to, or not, I hope you find yourself surrounded by family and those you love during this holiday season and are able to remember fondly those who are not with you. We often find ourselves buried in work, or too distracted by other problems, to share and remember a few moments with those closest to us. So many of us are separated by huge distances, we often find it easier to focus on those who are out of arm's reach yet so easy to connect with online, instead of those who are right beside us. So do yourself a favour, put down the keyboard (stylus, mouse, etc) and spend that time. I know I will. Merry Christmas. Powered by ScribeFire .

Comparing education systems based on their technology

(yes, I originally found this blog because of Scoble's note on it BUT it was kind of interesting all the same) Read Alex Mallet's summary of his first week at MIT. Malletrivia: Summary of the first complete week Wow - "There's an incredible amount of material packed into each lecture" - and it sounds interesting... Compared to some of the lecture content I have seen at our universities, you really must get what you pay for. While it sounds like Alex is writing frantically down notes in his classes, at least he's finding something worth writing about in them. Case in point: one of our local universities ( Carleton ) puts some lecture classes on the TV (like many universities do) - but you would think they purposely find the most boring professors to teach them. They put up PowerPoint slides with 30 points on them, speak in monotone voice (yes, imagine the typical caricature of the university lecture from years ago), tell the students to print their...