Scientists don’t get their due. After all, they can do almost anything. Except, you know, eavesdrop on our conversations by reading our brainwaves. Oh… wait. Apparently, now, they can. More »
This is horrifying. Professor Hideyuki Sawada of Kagawa University demonstrated this rubbery nightmare today that can imitate human speech. It’s only a matter of time before someone tries to have sex with it. More »
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If you ever want to steal something in spy movies, you need to tear out somebody’s eyeball or fake their voice. AT&T Safe will bring that same level of security to your online accounts with an iPhone app. More »
We usually assume words are just a way of expressing ideas already in our heads. But what if it’s the other way around? Some linguists say the languages we speak fundamentally alter the way we think and even perceive reality. More »
We’ve all seen the future of computing in movies. We talk to Hal and Jarvis and they’re smart enough to recognise what we want them to do. Today’s computers are learning to be like that, just not as cool. Yet More »
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Today, YouTube is rolling out automatic captioning for all videos uploaded to the service, using Google’s speech recognition service. You can see a demo in the video above. More »
We reported the Author’s Guild’s litigious anger about the Kindle 2′s text-to-voice feature, claiming it violates audio book copyrights. It’s an arguable position, but Amazon has gone ahead and caved to the literate man.
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]
newVideoPlayer("/speechmashup.flv", 506, 282,""); 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.
