I personally feel that ISPs are dinosaurs -- their primary reason for existing is to provide the 'other end' to your point-to-point modem connection. What happens when your computer is "directly connected" to the internet? There are only a few things that I can think of:
1. DHCP -- they give you an IP address. I would argue that DHCP will go away as IPv6 becomes more prominent.
2. Mail server -- why can't this be just any company on the internet that you want to contract?
3. News server -- ditto.
4. Web hosting -- ditto.
As far as the 'competition' argument goes, I'd argue that if you can also get internet service over power lines or DSL, then you have competition.
Well... I'm a former high-school geek myself, but I've also been doing a lot of volunteer work with high school kids for the past 10 years or so. And, I can tell you that this quote is right on. (I think the article itself draws some incorrect conclusions, though.)
The point is that it isn't just the geeks or the social misfits who have a hard time in high school -- that time of life is hard on *everybody*, but the symptoms show up in different ways. Here are some other ways it shows up: * Eating disorders * Suicide * Narcotic and Alcohol abuse * Steroid abuse * Promiscuity * Crime
Anorexic popular girls Football players who commit suicide The valedictorian who's a closet alcoholic The homecoming queen who thinks the only way to get boys to like her is to sleep with them. The champion wrester who turns to steroids so he'll keep winning and stay popular.
It's tough on everybody, "Jocks" and popular kids included. The main difference is how good the kid is at covering it up. Yeah, some kids tend to get the brunt of the physical abuse, but that doesn't mean that they're the only ones hurting.
In my school, they put the smart kids from one grade in gym with the delinquents from the next. I got a lot of abuse in gym class. But, looking back on it, I wouldn't trade it for being the star of the football team needing rehab.
So, if you had two teletype links and at the end of one link was Turing and at the end of the other was the statue, would you be able to tell them apart?
The main problem with speech recognition over the telephone is that the digital standard currently used by the PSTN samples voice at 8khz, with each sample being 8-bits wide. As a result, the speech recognition engine just doesn't have a whole lot of data to play with -- Speech recognition algorithms typically use a lot of statistics to determine how well a given chunk of speech matches a word stored in its vocabulary. The less data in the incoming speech, the harder it is to be accurate with a match. In fact, it actually gets harder, as many cell phones use various encoders to further reduce the data rate. Add that to interference and background noise, and ASR over the phone is decidedly not easy.
Many of the shrink-wrapped ASR applications that you see are designed to work through the microphone jack on a computer, which provides much more data than is available over the phone network. IBM, L&H and Dragon are the vendors I'm aware of.
Now, there are various vendors out there who do ASR for phone applications. Nortel (my employer, but not my project) has one, as does VCS, Nuance Communications and several others. These, however, are not generally priced for the consumer market. In addition, many of these solutions run on Digital Signal Processors, which require additional cards....
OSS speech rec would be a good thing, but I'm afraid that it's going to be a while before it comes to pass, just because of the complexity of the statistics and the specific knowledge required. Those reasons also mean that it'll probably be a while before a PDA has the juice for it.
(There's the urban legend of the guy presenting ASR control of his computer at a voice conference, when a voice from the back of the room shouts "Format c: Return" and somebody else chimes in "Yes Return")
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I personally feel that ISPs are dinosaurs -- their primary reason for existing is to provide the 'other end' to your point-to-point modem connection. What happens when your computer is "directly connected" to the internet? There are only a few things that I can think of:
1. DHCP -- they give you an IP address. I would argue that DHCP will go away as IPv6 becomes more prominent.
2. Mail server -- why can't this be just any company on the internet that you want to contract?
3. News server -- ditto.
4. Web hosting -- ditto.
As far as the 'competition' argument goes, I'd argue that if you can also get internet service over power lines or DSL, then you have competition.
Well... I'm a former high-school geek myself, but I've also been doing a lot of volunteer work with high school kids for the past 10 years or so. And, I can tell you that this quote is right on. (I think the article itself draws some incorrect conclusions, though.)
The point is that it isn't just the geeks or the social misfits who have a hard time in high school -- that time of life is hard on *everybody*, but the symptoms show up in different ways. Here are some other ways it shows up:
* Eating disorders
* Suicide
* Narcotic and Alcohol abuse
* Steroid abuse
* Promiscuity
* Crime
Anorexic popular girls
Football players who commit suicide
The valedictorian who's a closet alcoholic
The homecoming queen who thinks the only way to get boys to like her is to sleep with them.
The champion wrester who turns to steroids so he'll keep winning and stay popular.
It's tough on everybody, "Jocks" and popular kids included. The main difference is how good the kid is at covering it up. Yeah, some kids tend to get the brunt of the physical abuse, but that doesn't mean that they're the only ones hurting.
In my school, they put the smart kids from one grade in gym with the delinquents from the next. I got a lot of abuse in gym class. But, looking back on it, I wouldn't trade it for being the star of the football team needing rehab.
So, if you had two teletype links and at the end of one link was Turing and at the end of the other was the statue, would you be able to tell them apart?
Having worked on this for a while...
The main problem with speech recognition over the telephone is that the digital standard currently used by the PSTN samples voice at 8khz, with each sample being 8-bits wide. As a result, the speech recognition engine just doesn't have a whole lot of data to play with -- Speech recognition algorithms typically use a lot of statistics to determine how well a given chunk of speech matches a word stored in its vocabulary. The less data in the incoming speech, the harder it is to be accurate with a match. In fact, it actually gets harder, as many cell phones use various encoders to further reduce the data rate. Add that to interference and background noise, and ASR over the phone is decidedly not easy.
Many of the shrink-wrapped ASR applications that you see are designed to work through the microphone jack on a computer, which provides much more data than is available over the phone network. IBM, L&H and Dragon are the vendors I'm aware of.
Now, there are various vendors out there who do ASR for phone applications. Nortel (my employer, but not my project) has one, as does VCS, Nuance Communications and several others. These, however, are not generally priced for the consumer market. In addition, many of these solutions run on Digital Signal Processors, which require additional cards....
OSS speech rec would be a good thing, but I'm afraid that it's going to be a while before it comes to pass, just because of the complexity of the statistics and the specific knowledge required. Those reasons also mean that it'll probably be a while before a PDA has the juice for it.
(There's the urban legend of the guy presenting ASR control of his computer at a voice conference, when a voice from the back of the room shouts "Format c: Return" and somebody else chimes in "Yes Return")