iPod rumors
Scotsman.com News - Sci-Tech - Apple pips its rivals with the iPod that talks: "Converting text into speech has been a major goal of the computer industry for decades, but early versions of the technology struggled with difficult words and names."
I think he's confusing text-to-speech (TTS) with speech-to-text (STT). The Mac could do TTS since practically the beginning, and now with companies like AT&T and Cepstral there are some really good voices on the market, that sound very natural.
On the other hand, STT still has a few stumbling blocks to overcome. It has come a long way since it needed extensive training and is useful for a lot of things.
I have a friend who uses Naturally Speaking extensively and it is quite good but it has failed badly on some recorded content he was trying to transcribe.
On the whole however a talking iPod could be rather useful while driving around, it would be fun if it could do more then just speak the title, artist and album but also a little blurb about the song, maybe gotten from the comments field. That would be a fun little app or script, someone would have to create a wiki that could have all kinds of fun sayings to fill in between songs with. Things like: The weatherperson says it will be chili today but hot tamale.
Of course there needs to be an easy way to turn this off. You wouldn't want song announcements during a romantic evening.
There are also ideas of the iPod changing its signature white/black skin for metal. Aluminum is the big idea but I've also seen hints at magnesium, but that is too light except maybe for a redesigned iPod shuffle which is very weight conscience, and stainless steel. anything is possible.
I think he's confusing text-to-speech (TTS) with speech-to-text (STT). The Mac could do TTS since practically the beginning, and now with companies like AT&T and Cepstral there are some really good voices on the market, that sound very natural.
On the other hand, STT still has a few stumbling blocks to overcome. It has come a long way since it needed extensive training and is useful for a lot of things.
I have a friend who uses Naturally Speaking extensively and it is quite good but it has failed badly on some recorded content he was trying to transcribe.
On the whole however a talking iPod could be rather useful while driving around, it would be fun if it could do more then just speak the title, artist and album but also a little blurb about the song, maybe gotten from the comments field. That would be a fun little app or script, someone would have to create a wiki that could have all kinds of fun sayings to fill in between songs with. Things like: The weatherperson says it will be chili today but hot tamale.
Of course there needs to be an easy way to turn this off. You wouldn't want song announcements during a romantic evening.
There are also ideas of the iPod changing its signature white/black skin for metal. Aluminum is the big idea but I've also seen hints at magnesium, but that is too light except maybe for a redesigned iPod shuffle which is very weight conscience, and stainless steel. anything is possible.
posted by Stephan at 11:34 AM
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