Technology – Page 62

Daisy Bell

Daisy Bell is a song very close to my heart, it was composed by Henry Dacre in 1892 as an ode to the beauty of a real life “daisy”, Frances Evelyn Maynard. However this is not the event that makes it special for me. It was the first song ever to be sung by electronic speech synthesis in bell labs by John Kelly in 1962 on an IBM 704 computer and guess who visited this facility? Aurthur C. Clarke, who then used this very song in 2001 a space odyssey during HAL’s most famous deactivation. Then again, the whole point is that it opened up a whole new frontier (speech synthesis) which soon became mainstream after this pioneering stunt took place.

There are several ways of doing speech synthesis one of them is known as concatenative synthesis. Which is stringing together recorded speech from a huge speech and then playing it with an associated file with it’s keyword or the phones, phrase etc. which are being said in the sentence, the down side of this is that it doesn’t sound continuous unless one uses algorithms to level out the volume difference , which might occur between two clips or there might be a slightly different speaking style in which the human speaks between two clips. Thus if the glitches are taken care of it is one of the most convincing forms but then again this system uses a huge database for generating speech , now the implications are that it takes up space and computing power to access it so it can be inefficient for small scale implementation but then again there is miniaturization.

One could also use Diphones which are nothing but transition between two sounds or phones so you use these to create speech in a very rambling sort of way. Personally I like this method as it will use up less space and it will be in my opinion extremely convincing when we make it work like it should work, however the problem is that it’s pretty hard to do that…

The rest of them are in my opinion needlessly complex like formant synthesis

Formant synthesis does not use human speech samples at runtime. Instead, the synthesized speech output is created using an acoustic model. Parameters such as fundamental frequency, voicing, and noise levels are varied over time to create a waveform of artificial speech. This method is sometimes called rules-based synthesis; however, many concatenative systems also have rules-based components.

This doesn’t produce convincing speech in any case, possibly due to the fact that our models are not that thorough or however it currently it does have a few advantages but then again it’s needlessly complicated. Now the thing is that there exists every type of system one can think of but the main argument here is to make them seamless and reliable. It may be like early computer graphics given enough time and computational power we may finally reach HAL…

The Need For Social Media

I was just reading some old computer magazine archives that I have, and I couldn’t help but wonder about the need for social media like blogs. Now many people dismiss blogs as trash where people get to rant, but I disagree. Take tech magazines and blogs for example. I was reading the PC World (India) website award stories online, and the one thing which really struck me was that none of the jury members seemed to be actual site members, who have a FEEL for what their service actually IS. It’s all OK to talk of which site looks good compared to some other site, but it doesn’t tell you a wetslap about ground realities. So for example, they can go on and on about how nice XYZ education site is, but they’re not the friggin’ students, are they? Nor could they ever match, say, Ankit Sud’s review of photo printing sites in India; simply because they never ORDERED prints from ANY of the sites in the first place! Only an actual user of the service who puts up his review can tell you how good it is in real life – that’s something any tech mag CAN’T do.

photo credit: MexicanwaveIt’s not just that – when considering tech product reviews, you’ll notice that that the quality of customer is never factored in, and yet it’s a very pertinent question. Only Apoorv Khatreja could tell you about current issues with Altec Lansing’s customer support, while the tech mags only comment on the copy they get to test on which. Which brings the other point – since most of the products they get for reviewing are not bought but given to them specifically for the purpose of reviewing, they are not necessarily impartial. You’ll notice that Indian magazines like Digit and Chip never have the gall to give a REALLY bad review about any product. Ones from foreign shores like PC World DO have a set of balls and occasionally tear a product apart, but still, the majority of their review end up giving 75-85% approval ratings – weird for real-world products. I’m not advocating magazines here, but just pointing out that tech magazines – or even blogs like Gizomodo or Engadget – may not like to bite the hand that feeds them (rather, gives them products to review). I’m not saying that they blatantly write advertisements, but that when they’re getting the products as a ‘favor’ rather than BUYING it, you tend to be sub-consciously partial towards the product. Something that a blogger review doesn’t have to face with.

That, and the fact that they use the product for a lesser period of time than someone who publishes to his blog. Only I could tell you that I dropped my LG phone from my first floor balcony, without any harm coming to the phone; or the fact that it’s predictive text input sucks. Not some tech reviewer who may have a few hours – or a day at max – to review a product which he hasn’t bought, but received as a ‘gift’. They simply don’t get enough time to tell about the lifetime of use a product undergoes!

That’s the power of Web 2.0. Getting to know stuff first-hand from people, people who are passionate about spreading their bit of knowledge to others.