I have no idea what my mum’s cell phone number is. I don’t think I’ve ever known the phone number of a girlfriend. Why would I? You probably don’t either! Contact lists killed them. But web service Go800 wants to skip the whole number thing entirely, letting you hit people via their Twitter handle to connect a call. More »
This weird looking chap is the Waseda Talker-7 robot, and it makes those strange vowel sounds not through a loudspeaker, but a biomechanical simulation of the way we humans speak. To that end, it’s got a 19 degrees-of-freedom motorised system that replicates lungs, vocal cords, tongue, lips: basically the whole deal. Most interestingly, Takanishi labs wants to use the tech not for a speaking robot, but to build it into a mobile phone for high-compression speech synthesis. And that makes me look forward to the day my phone can blow a raspberry at me. [BotJunkie]
Every office has a pompous windbag or ten that monopolises meeting time with their constant interruptions. And while making fun of those idiots after the fact is a staple of office life, the sad truth is that thousands of hours are lost to these interruptions, and efficiency suffers because of them. Lucky for office life, the brainpower at MIT is hard at work on a series of devices and badges that implement “reality mining” to eliminate these blowhards forever. And no, this has nothing to do with military lasers.
