The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘your-product’

Got something really cool and you want to make sure nobody gives it a second look? Take some notes from this press release and soon you’ll be able to take something awesome like a 3D laser projection system and make it sound about as exciting as a new 3-hole punch. Laser-3D is unique in that it fuses two of the most popular concepts in the public consciousness, ‘lasers’ and ‘3-D’ I’m going to stop you right there

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How to make a 3D laser projector sound uncool

I’ll be in Helsinki next week and I’d like to plan a very informal meet-up on Tuesday, April 28 at about 7pm. All those Finns in favor, please email me at john@crunchgear.com with the subject line “RSVP HELSINKI.”

We’ve decided to have the meet-up at A21 on Annankatu 21 [Google Map]. PLEASE RSVP ASAP so I can offer them a head count.

Best of all, F-Secure, the anti-virus people, will be sponsoring an hour of drinks from about 7pm-8pm. Anyone wishing sponsor another few hours should email me.

N.B. If you have a start-up to discuss, please have some information handy, preferably in electronic form. It will probably be hard to do demos unless they’re on a mobile phone, but if you contact me beforehand we can probably sit down to look at your product on a laptop.

DVICE has an excellent video showing the difference between text-to-speech and what us humans call “neurons-to-speech.” As evidenced by this brief scene from Blade Runner, acted out by an iPod Shuffle and a Kindle 2, we find that the Authors Guild is as crazy as a sack of beetles in a windstorm.

TTS hasn’t improved for one good reason: the human voice is just fine for reading out text and through the use of simple synthesis - Garmin, for example, uses a nice Australian woman to synthesize everything its GPS devices have to say - you can say almost anything you want. Although you’ll get a few clinkers in there where the software can’t quite translate a phoneme, it’s mostly correct.