Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 11:49:57 +0100 From: Alex Zbyslaw <xfb52@dial.pipex.com> To: el-sino@hushmail.com Cc: questions@freebsd.org, tedm@toybox.placo.com Subject: Re: freebsd as the basis for something better? Message-ID: <42BFD9D5.4020408@dial.pipex.com> In-Reply-To: <200506270948.j5R9mcYG032792@mailserver3.hushmail.com> References: <200506270948.j5R9mcYG032792@mailserver3.hushmail.com>
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el-sino@hushmail.com wrote: >i'm sure we could do something innovative with: > >http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival > >for instance, just having a hot voice reading my command >outputs would already be darn cool to me. > > I worked there for a while, and know a couple of the people who worked on this project -- certainly talented individuals, though, sadly, Richard Caley is no longer with us. That aside, one of the things I hated was being in a roomful of people coming up to demo time, all babbling away into headset mikes while another set of people had their computer babbling back to them, sounding like Steven Hawking. Enough to drive you up the wall. If I wanted that, I'd work in a call center. And, of course, much of the software I worked on was developed using good, old keyboard and mouse, running good, old CLI Unix, with maybe a GUI C/C++ development environment (though mine was mostly emacs). There are applications where speech input or output are undoubtedly useful. But as a general replacement for keyboard and mouse? No thanks. When people speak to you, they are usually capable of picking up visual and verbal clues that, for example, that tell them when to shut up. Computers are a long, long way from that. And which would you rather do to edit the last command you ran? Type "^P ESC-b ESC-b Del Del 2 SPACE" or have to say "Redo last command, substitute final 1 for a 2"? Time yourself and see which is quicker :-) Then make the example more complicated :-) On the other hand, if I could get my PC to listen in on a technical phone call, and manage to take notes (even verbatim) of what was said, that would save lots of typing up minutes afterwards trying to remember what was actually said. Of course, recognizing telephone quality, technical speech, spoken at normal speed and with the software not trained on the speakers, is, as far as I am aware, several pipe-dreams rolled into one. --Alex
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