If half your work day is spent thinking up ways to troll and annoy your co-workers, today's going to be an easy one. Neil Thapen's Pink Trombone is a browser-based speech synthesiser that lets you manipulate a simulated mouth, throat, tongue, and nasal cavity to create a remarkably realistic -- and equally annoying -- human voice.
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Amazon recently announced that the Alexa AI powering its Echo and other hardware has now learned 1,000 "skills" (up from just 135 in January). In case you're not up to speed with all the new tricks, we've picked out 40 of our favourites -- you can discover the other 960 yourself.
Google's artificial intelligence is getting speedily (and worryingly?) better, as its recent slam-dunk of a human Go champion demonstrated. That victory required highly computationally-efficient AI rather than just brute force, something Google thinks could help it move speech recognition offline.
One of the coolest new Windows 10 features is talking to your computer. For many people, it will be the first time they have had a voice-activated personal assistant on tap. And yet, most computers won't have Cortana turned on by default -- allegedly because they don't have certified high-quality microphones built-in.
Unless you're one of the handful of people rocking a Windows Phone, you won't have much experience with Cortana, Microsoft's personal digital assistant. With the roll-out of Windows 10, Cortana is about to make a lot of new friends very quickly -- and like me, they might soon find themselves shouting instructions at their computer on a regular basis.
Here's a good deed you can do without parting with a single thing. Synthetic voices for people who have lost the ability to speak only come in generic types -- think of Stephen Hawking's voice -- but one fascinating project wants to build custom voices for each person. To do that they need your help: specifically, a recording of your voice.
There are a lot of cool things you can do with Google Now, but with Google constantly adding more voice commands (and integrating Google Now even more with Android KitKat), it's easy to forget all your options. This graphic shows many of the latest instructions available if you just say "OK Google..." or tap the microphone.
People who have been blind since a young age can sometimes learn to develop a sort of low-grade echolocation. This technique, used by the likes of Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Ronnie Milsap, and Ben Underwood, works much the same way as it does in bats and dolphins. But people who have just recently lost their sight can't harness this ability innately. They need the vOICe to do it for them.