speech

Hearwho crunches text into MP3s for your amusement

Listening to MP3s of robotic voices reading stories from the Web is a good way to prepare for the eventual downfall of mankind at the hands of our robotic overlords. If you're into that kind of thing, Hearwho will do all the heavy lifting for you by converting any text you feed it into a downloadable MP3 file.

If you've spent hours amusing yourself playing with AT&T's text-to-speech demo, you'll be glad to know that Hearwho does away with the somewhat annoying 300-character limit. I dumped an entire 800-word story into the text box … Read more

Voice search for the iPhone? Maybe someday

For years, people have wondered when they would be able to voice a command to a digital device, have it understand the query, and respond with some degree of intelligence. That day still isn't here, but speech-technology companies like Nuance are working on it.

On Tuesday, Nuance, maker of Dragon Naturally Speaking for the desktop, said that it has developed a prototype for voice search on Apple's iPhone. In August, the company plans to start selling a downloadable application for the iPhone that lets them speak a question to the phone to retrieve search results from Google or … Read more

Dixero turns your RSS feeds into podcasts

Who doesn't like listening to computer generated human voices for hours at a time? If you're a fan of Microsoft Sam, you should check out Dixero, a service that turns RSS feeds into podcasts you can subscribe to and listen to on your computer or portable devices. The company is showing of its products at this week's Web 2.0 Expo, despite the incredibly noisy show floor.

The listening quality is about the same as Odiogo, a service I looked at a few months back and have used with great success on blogs and news sites that … Read more

One step closer to a universal translator

SpeechGear's Compadre suite of translation software brings us one step closer the sci-fi ideal of a universal translator. The full suite of five programs gives you the ability to instantly translate anything you see, hear, or read into a ton of languages, including Spanish, German, Dutch, Iraqi, Chinese, Japanese, and more.

The most exciting portion of the software is Interact, which lets you have a near-real-time conversation with a speaker of a foreign language. You and your conversant simply speak into a microphone that's connected to your computer; the program uses voice recognition, machine translation, and speech synthesis … Read more

Freedom of speech online: Unclear on the concept

A German politician recently sued Wikipedia to have images related to the Third Reich removed from the site. Then she changed her mind and withdrew the complaint, after vehement disapproval by her own party. But she's still campaigning to have an Internet-wide agreement not to use or display "anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, and extreme right positions."

It's not just Wikipedia: Yahoo, YouTube, and eBay have all occasionally drawn criticism (and legal action) for providing information and documents from Nazi Germany.

Where should Web sites draw the line between documenting the truth and providing fuel for hate movements?… Read more

Odiogo does really cool text-to-speech for blogs

Here's a neat service for blog owners who want to add another layer of distribution for their content. It's called Odiogo, and it will take any written blog entries and turn them into spoken word. It uses an integrated player that sticks itself on top of every blog post, and lets readers listen to any post in lieu of reading.

I came across the service while reading a post on UNEASYsilence about hacking the new eeePCs to run a hacked version OS X Leopard (which apparently runs about as well as it can on the aged processor), and … Read more

Air Force fighter to use speech recognition

The next U.S. Air Force maverick may be talking to her plane instead of looking at its dash for updates.

The F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, which the Air Force plans to roll out in 2008, will be the first U.S. fighter to respond to voice commands, the Air Force announced Wednesday.

The Air Force Research Laboratory's Human Effectiveness Directorate has been working on the idea for some time, trying out different systems from a variety of companies.

After years of testing, it now has a speech-recognition system that works from a microphone within a pilot'… Read more

Verizon refuses to carry activist text messages

This news may hit CNET tomorrow as a New York Times cross-post, but I haven't seen anything about it yet so I wanted to be sure it was reported here.

According to the Times, Verizon, one of the nation's two largest wireless carriers, told NARAL that it would not allow the reproductive rights organization to send text messages through a program using Verizon's mobile network, on the grounds that Verizon has the right to block "controversial or unsavory" text messages.… Read more

Kathy Griffin to be censored on Emmy telecast

When Kathy Griffin decided to make a point by not thanking Jesus when she accepted the award for best reality program at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards she planned to offend people. She's a comedian and it's part of her shtick, but when people sit down this weekend to watch the awards show on E!, they won't hear what Griffin had to say. Just what could she have possibly said that was deemed to controversial for cable television? A new video up at CNN.com shows Griffin stating, "A lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus. Suck it, Jesus. This award is my god now."

Certainly it isn't the sort of thing you'd say at dinner after inviting over the local pastor, but it hardly qualifies as obscene either. Besides, cable television stations have few limitations to what can't be broadcast and Griffin's statement doesn't even come close. So why is E! censoring Griffin's comments?

… Read more