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Digital 'Ghosts' To Guide Students On Campus
Hambone.dk writes "The students at Copenhagen's new IT University will soon be guided by invisible, but talkative digital agents, known as ghosts or Disembodied Location-specific Conversational Agents. The ghosts are to compete amongst themselves for privileges such as better vocabulary or the ability to clone themselves. Ignored ghosts can die out completely. This project is a lot more serious than it sounds at face value - several papers have been published already."
Wasn't this sort of already done with the GotDotNet Terrarium Project, it's not as intelligent but it sounds like the same idea.
You can click the round bubbly icons to get text read to you. It sounds like it's prerecorded, though, as the text read and the text displayed is subtly different (there's a split infinitive in the sound that's fixed in the text, for example).
Remember what happened with the American car "nova" or "no go" in Spanish?
A myth, an urban legend.
To summarize the snopes entry..
First of all, you wouldn't say "no va" in spanish, you'd say "no machina", "no functiona" or "no trabaja" (doesnt work). "Don't go" is slang from ignorant english folks, it doesn't translate. Apologies for my bad spanish.
Secondly, it's like saying an english speaker wouldn't buy a dinette set under the brand name "Notable" because it says "no table". The legend insinuates that the spanish are somehow stupider than we are. (Like the myth of africans being shocked to see baby food on store shelves because they cant read and just look at the pictures and assume thats what's in the jar)
Thirdly, the punchline of the story is that Chevy changed the name to "Caribe" and sales took off. But, Volkswagon already sold a "Caribe" in Mexico - it was the Golf here. The name "Nova" was never changed in mexico.
Lastly, there's a brand of gasoline in Mexico called "Nova". It sells fine.
Basically it's just a subtly racist urban legend. "Dem wetbacks is so stupid they tink Nova means No Go!"
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Not without a clever hack. Clippy is a Microsoft Agent, and could easily use any text-to-speech engine that works with SAPI4, except for two things: (1) the Clippy .acs is specifically flagged not talk, so you can't make it talk even in your own app, (2) Office sets text-only output even if you reg-hack it to use a talking agent like Merlin or Genie.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Smelling "burnt toast" is a symptom of some psychiatric diseases.
It's mentioned here.
Also in use in the exhibition of architecture by Daniel Liebeskind at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Extremely neat. You approach a screen showing a movie, and your headphones synchronize perfectly to the film. Works very well.