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Toshiba's TLP-X200U Projector Is the First To Talk, For Some Reason
Posted by Kit Eaton at 8:05 PM on November 4, 2008
This may not be as small as yesterday's picoprojector, but Toshiba's TLP-X200U projector is still portable, and touted as being the world's first with talking guidance. Apparently it's designed to make the thing easier to use, and it also talks you through maintenance procedures, with the aim of making it all work better for you, and thus saving you money in the long run. Elsewise it's got 3LCD tech, 1024 x 768-pixels resolution, 3000 ANSI lumen brightness and a 600:1 contrast ratio, and it's wired and wireless LAN capable. It may indeed be "slim, light and compact" and have that voice function, but for an MSRP of $US1,740 I'd expect it to have an LCARS touchpanel and Majel Barrett's dulcet digital tones. [I4U]
AT&T's Speech Mashups is a web-based service that will bring voice-activated search to the iPhone, as well as other Edge and 3G handsets. Instead of managing speech recognition on the actual handset, Speech Mashups sends the audio sample to the server, processes it and sends back a text transcription or command to your phone. Unfortunately for iPhone owners, this does not mean voice dialing or speech-to-text app support. Not at all.
To commemorate the golden jubilee of America's Defence Advance Research Projects Agency—formed these 50 years ago in response to a little traveller called Sputnik—New Scientist has come up with a short list of 10 DARPA inventions: five that changed the world, and five that fell flat:
PhoneTag, the gang who turns 
I used to want a car just like KITT when I was a kid, though perhaps without that slightly annoying nasal voice. And now a Stanford scientist is looking at whether nattering to your vehicle may be good for you, the car, other road users and even (darnit) your insurers or advertising execs. 
In the days when intense UV radiation is of a constant threat to our eyes, looking has become a chore. That's why the $48 rotary Zihotch Watch is so promising. You simply dial...err...pull "117" and the watch will read you the time, just like the old days when you had to call people to look at their sundials for you. We're digging the retro interface but wish there were a few more secret codes we could enter for functions other than mundanely adjusting the time or alarm. Making phone calls, for instance, would be a start—though we'd gladly settle for a direct line to just one or two 900 numbers. [
The brains at Tokyo University of Science and the Musashino Red Cross Hospital have joined forces to create a robot that will mimic the oral movements needed to articulate speech. The machine currently consists of a silicone tongue and a motorized lower jaw encapsulated in an artificial mouth structure.
