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Talking Palm

Posted by timothy on from the your-door-is-ajar dept.

Isotopia writes: "This article from the NY Times is very cool. It's about this guy from IBM who was able to put voice recognition on his Palm III and it talks to him! It can remind him about meetings and it will tell him when his battery is getting low." I bet if you used this much, it would tell you how low the battery is -- frequently. That aside, it's amazing that IBM has been able to squeeze this onto a Palm.

5 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Windows Ce by JohnHegarty · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I take it simular would be possible on Windows CE.

    Also could this be used as a controler for a voice controled x11 system ?

    --
    Cruise TT
  2. this is what a palm really needs by kochsr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    this is what has been standing in the way of handheld devices. you need to be able to say, "New apointment with whoever, whenever" and it needs to be able to accurately record that. I could care less about it talking back to you... but the input is what is important IMHO

  3. Not to rain on anyone's parade... by CropCircles · · Score: 2, Interesting

    but does it really talk back or just plays a chime (human voice, pre-recorded) when certain system conditions are triggered off. Let's not get too excited ;-) though "talking computers" are going to be the next big thing in user interface...hrm...two years ago we heard a lot about MSFT doing work on voice regonition and such....what's happening on that front?

    1. Re:Not to rain on anyone's parade... by commanderfoxtrot · · Score: 3, Interesting

      A proper voice recognition system should be able to understand any words in the English language... the chances are this system is simply used to control a few Palm commands and therefore the incoming speech patterns only need to be compared to a few stored patterns. Then a system of pre-synthesising the outgoing speech would reduce further the demands on the CPU but use more disk. I have my Pentium 75 talking to me using the University of Edinburgh's Festival system on Linux by pre-synthesising the most important words.

      By the way, the festival system is excellent and takes under ten minutes to download, compile and install!

      --
      http://blog.grcm.net/
  4. Actually, its not that impressive.. by Bowie+J.+Poag · · Score: 3, Interesting



    Voice synthesis (I dunno about voice analysis, however) has been around since the early 1960's. A few years ago, I picked up a CD called "Computer Music Currents, Vol. 13 : A History Of Digital Sound Synthesis" published by a German outfit called Wergo. It contained nothing but rare, early recordings of engineers trying to produce music with computers, with some attempts going back to the late 1950's.

    Anyway, this CD came with a booklet, and an interesting story. Theres a famous scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where HAL offers to sing "Daisy, Daisy, A Bicycle Built For Two" as he's dying. Arthur C. Clarke once visited AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1962 where he saw a demonstration of a "singing computer", in the form of an IBM 7094 Mainframe with voice synthesis capabilities. The engineers had taught the machine how to play the song, and then superimpose a synthesized voice ontop of it, in realtime. It impressed (or scared the shit out of him) enough that he chose to write it into the story, and what later became the film.

    All of this was done under 128K of RAM, top to bottom.

    The story also has an interesting anecdote about how many punched cards it took to pull it off-- Something like 28,000 paper punch cards if I remember correctly. The engineers (one of whom later turned out to be my C and x86 Assembly instructor in college) remembered there was some concern about how to transport them, that putting them in the back seat of a Volkswagon would crush the axles. Heheheh..

    Cheers,

    --
    Bowie J. Poag