From http://www.communitypress-online.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=2466882
Regional – When it comes to assistive technology, the local Catholic school board is making what Kim Carmichael calls amazing progress.
Carmichael, the Algonquin and Lakeshore Catholic District School Board special assignment teacher in charge of assistive technology, updated the board and provided examples of equipment and software with the help of two students.
Assistive technology includes tools such as computer hardware and software, FM systems and other equipment funded through the board's special equipment amount (SEA) to support students with a variety of learning disabilities.
"Particularly in my role technology is a gift," Carmichael said. "With appropriate supports students can achieve at a high level and assistive technology is one of them."
There are currently 640 SEA-funded systems in use in the board, 220 of which have been ordered since September.
Carmichael said back then the waiting list for equipment was about nine months or more, but changes to ordering have reduced that to about three months.
"We've made a lot of amazing progress now," Carmichael said. "Most boards we've talked to in Eastern Ontario are still in the nine- to 12-month range, so we're very proud of what we've accomplished this year."
She has also trained 36 teacher and 48 educational assistants at 17 schools in the use of various software programs during this school year.
The programs include software to help students organize their thoughts, text-to-speech programs and others.
Hanna Abrams, a Grade 8 student at St. Mary School in Read, demonstrated how she uses some of the software – referred to as mind mapping – to organize her thoughts and help her read and write.
She has been using assistive technology since Grade 5 and said she initially thought it was "really cool." But other students became envious, she said, and she felt singled out and didn't want to use it.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
New Teach Yourself Singing Website Uses Site Pal Speech Bots
From http://www.seopressreleases.com/teach-singing-website-site-pal-speech-bots/6774
Welcome Bot And FAQ Bot Explain How To Tune Your Voice And Simg
Pearland , Texas, February 25, 2010 — What do you do if you want to add video to your website and do not even own a camcorder? Or for whatever reasons you do want at this time to put your face and your voice online and you do not know any supermodels who will work for free. How about a talking speech bot, that looks and sounds like a great looking and sounding live person in a video.
When a visitor goes to my new website for my new family singing course, Teach Yourself Singing If You Can Talk You Can Sing, a welcome video window pops up and a beautiful spokes model from the UK, explains how my new singing course teaches any child, teen, adult, and senior, how to tune their voice, so their singing sounds great. The same spokes model also pops up on my how to sing website FAQ page and answers the most often questions about Vocal Tuning.
The speech bots were designed by SitePal and they have dozens and dozens of models you can choose from, and dozens and dozens of voices you can choose from. You can even record your own voice and use it with any SitePal model. SitePal can also make a custom speech bot from a photo of yourself. SitePal offers a free 15 day trail. After that, there are a variety of rental plans, where you sign up for so many speech Bot playback streams per month or per year. Adding a SitePal to your website is not expansive at all. My plan also allows me to put my SitePal on ebay, or in an email and many other placement options.
A SitePal Speech Bot or Text To Speech Bot is a great fit for my Teach Yourself Singing If You Can Talk You Can Sing website. I can change spokes models appearance, gender, language, and what the Speech Bot says in just a few minutes. Much faster and easier than making and uploading videos and replacing them with new videos. I still plan to use videos in the futire, but for right now Talking Bots are very effective for Teach Yourself Singing If You Can Talk You Can Sing.
Welcome Bot And FAQ Bot Explain How To Tune Your Voice And Simg
Pearland , Texas, February 25, 2010 — What do you do if you want to add video to your website and do not even own a camcorder? Or for whatever reasons you do want at this time to put your face and your voice online and you do not know any supermodels who will work for free. How about a talking speech bot, that looks and sounds like a great looking and sounding live person in a video.
When a visitor goes to my new website for my new family singing course, Teach Yourself Singing If You Can Talk You Can Sing, a welcome video window pops up and a beautiful spokes model from the UK, explains how my new singing course teaches any child, teen, adult, and senior, how to tune their voice, so their singing sounds great. The same spokes model also pops up on my how to sing website FAQ page and answers the most often questions about Vocal Tuning.
The speech bots were designed by SitePal and they have dozens and dozens of models you can choose from, and dozens and dozens of voices you can choose from. You can even record your own voice and use it with any SitePal model. SitePal can also make a custom speech bot from a photo of yourself. SitePal offers a free 15 day trail. After that, there are a variety of rental plans, where you sign up for so many speech Bot playback streams per month or per year. Adding a SitePal to your website is not expansive at all. My plan also allows me to put my SitePal on ebay, or in an email and many other placement options.
A SitePal Speech Bot or Text To Speech Bot is a great fit for my Teach Yourself Singing If You Can Talk You Can Sing website. I can change spokes models appearance, gender, language, and what the Speech Bot says in just a few minutes. Much faster and easier than making and uploading videos and replacing them with new videos. I still plan to use videos in the futire, but for right now Talking Bots are very effective for Teach Yourself Singing If You Can Talk You Can Sing.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Roger Ebert To Appear On 'Oprah' Tuesday With New Voice
From http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/26/roger-ebert-to-appear-on_n_479007.html
During Roger Ebert's much-anticipated appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" Tuesday, the iconic film critic who has been voiceless for two years following throat surgery will be speaking with a computer-generated voice that reportedly sounds like the one he has lost.
During Friday's taping of the Oprah show, Ebert tested out his new voice and sounded "like himself for the first time in nearly four years since his battle and recovery from thyroid cancer left him voiceless," the Chicago Tribune reports.
As the recent interview with Ebert in Esquire pointed out, a Scottish company called CereProc has made this possible. The Tribune reports:
Last summer, Ebert found the Web site of CereProc, a company based in Edinburgh, Scotland that uses "text to speech" technology to provide people with voices that "sound real" and "have character," according to the company's Web site.
Using mostly audio from Ebert's own voice on DVD commentaries of "Citizen Kane" and "Casablanca," the company created a voice that sounds like the one he lost.
Matthew Aylett, chief technical officer for CereProc, told the Tribune that it is the first time the company has produced a voice that sounded like the voice of the person using it.
"Roger has many years of experience in broadcasting," Aylett told the Tribune. "Obviously we couldn't record him but he did have a lot of audio material we could use to build his voice."
Ebert has expressed frustration about not being able to speak in his blog, but also noted that his writing has improved since he lost his voice.
During Roger Ebert's much-anticipated appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" Tuesday, the iconic film critic who has been voiceless for two years following throat surgery will be speaking with a computer-generated voice that reportedly sounds like the one he has lost.
During Friday's taping of the Oprah show, Ebert tested out his new voice and sounded "like himself for the first time in nearly four years since his battle and recovery from thyroid cancer left him voiceless," the Chicago Tribune reports.
As the recent interview with Ebert in Esquire pointed out, a Scottish company called CereProc has made this possible. The Tribune reports:
Last summer, Ebert found the Web site of CereProc, a company based in Edinburgh, Scotland that uses "text to speech" technology to provide people with voices that "sound real" and "have character," according to the company's Web site.
Using mostly audio from Ebert's own voice on DVD commentaries of "Citizen Kane" and "Casablanca," the company created a voice that sounds like the one he lost.
Matthew Aylett, chief technical officer for CereProc, told the Tribune that it is the first time the company has produced a voice that sounded like the voice of the person using it.
"Roger has many years of experience in broadcasting," Aylett told the Tribune. "Obviously we couldn't record him but he did have a lot of audio material we could use to build his voice."
Ebert has expressed frustration about not being able to speak in his blog, but also noted that his writing has improved since he lost his voice.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Small changes can make a big difference to the support of disabled employees, says iansyst Ltd at Health and Wellbeing 2010
From http://www.24dash.com/news/Health/2010-02-24-Small-changes-can-make-a-big-difference-to-the-support-of-disabled-employees-says-iansyst-Ltd-at-Health-and-Wellbeing-2010
Published by Livewire for Livewire Public Relations in Health and also in Education
Wednesday 24th February 2010 - 4:14pm
Small changes in the workplace can make all the difference to disabled employees, says leading assistive technology specialist iansyst Ltd. At the 2010 Health and Wellbeing Conference iansyst will be showcasing its latest technology and software and will be offering expert advice on workplace disability provision.
Further to the introduction of the Disability Discrimination Act, it is more crucial than ever for employers to provide the appropriate support. iansyst will highlight adjustments that can be made to facilitate full participation in the workplace for disabled employees. It is often assumed that such changes will be expensive and impractical; iansyst will identify a variety of measures which can be easily implemented and will have a positive impact on the workplace experience for disabled employees. Simple things like ensuring easy access to information, the provision of assistive handheld technologies and implementing inclusive HR policies can make all the difference.
iansyst will be sharing best practice and ideas for practical training to enable HR managers to meet these expectations. There will be a showcase of various assistive technologies on the stand; these include Audio Notetaker and CapturaTalk mobile phone software. Audio Notetaker enables users to annotate and organise digital recordings; whilst CapturaTalk converts text-to-speech from a digital photo. iansyst takes a full-service approach to technology provision: it will suggest a solution, provide training and offer continued support from its team of service experts.
Janine King, Managing Director at iansyst Ltd commented: “A happy workforce is a loyal workforce. By making changes to support disabled employees, employers are able to encourage a culture of productivity and are likely to retain staff for longer periods of time. iansyst experts are available to discuss what employers can do to support those with disabilities like dyslexia, dyscalculia or visual impairment. Our team will be on stand at the show ready to offer their guidance and support.”
Published by Livewire for Livewire Public Relations in Health and also in Education
Wednesday 24th February 2010 - 4:14pm
Small changes in the workplace can make all the difference to disabled employees, says leading assistive technology specialist iansyst Ltd. At the 2010 Health and Wellbeing Conference iansyst will be showcasing its latest technology and software and will be offering expert advice on workplace disability provision.
Further to the introduction of the Disability Discrimination Act, it is more crucial than ever for employers to provide the appropriate support. iansyst will highlight adjustments that can be made to facilitate full participation in the workplace for disabled employees. It is often assumed that such changes will be expensive and impractical; iansyst will identify a variety of measures which can be easily implemented and will have a positive impact on the workplace experience for disabled employees. Simple things like ensuring easy access to information, the provision of assistive handheld technologies and implementing inclusive HR policies can make all the difference.
iansyst will be sharing best practice and ideas for practical training to enable HR managers to meet these expectations. There will be a showcase of various assistive technologies on the stand; these include Audio Notetaker and CapturaTalk mobile phone software. Audio Notetaker enables users to annotate and organise digital recordings; whilst CapturaTalk converts text-to-speech from a digital photo. iansyst takes a full-service approach to technology provision: it will suggest a solution, provide training and offer continued support from its team of service experts.
Janine King, Managing Director at iansyst Ltd commented: “A happy workforce is a loyal workforce. By making changes to support disabled employees, employers are able to encourage a culture of productivity and are likely to retain staff for longer periods of time. iansyst experts are available to discuss what employers can do to support those with disabilities like dyslexia, dyscalculia or visual impairment. Our team will be on stand at the show ready to offer their guidance and support.”
Committed to supporting dyslexic students - Read&Write in the Leeds College of Art
From http://www.prlog.org/10546603-committed-to-supporting-dyslexic-students-readwrite-in-the-leeds-college-of-art.html
PR Log (Press Release) – Feb 24, 2010 – Leeds College of Art has recently installed Read&Write Assistive software on the Colleges’ computer network to support the work of dyslexic students within the College.
The College provides for both further and higher education through its National Diplomas and 12 degree programs. Being a Specialist Arts College, there are quite a number of students with specific difficulties, which Frances Bosley (Learning Development Manager at Leeds College) says is the main reason behind the purchase of Read&Write software.
Frances commented “With being an Art College a lot of the work is practical, but there are also some written aspects, for example students have to complete essays and complete a dissertation and this is when Read&Write software is beneficial. Some courses are also more IT focused which lend themselves especially to using the software”.
Read&Write GOLD is Texthelp’s award-winning literacy support software designed to assist students with literacy difficulties. The software works discreetly with all mainstream Windows applications (including MS Vista), allowing users the opportunity to work in an inclusive manner alongside their colleagues. Read&Write improves access to Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) and Digital Exams.
Read&Write GOLD is easy to use and features include: Screen Masking (to tint or mask sections of the window), Texthelp Voices (new text-to-speech voices), a Translator which translates selected words into French, Spanish, German or Italian, enhanced Spelling, Dictionary & Homophone support, and the software echoes back Dragon text.
Frances continues: “The students like the advanced Spell Check feature which is helpful because it provides definitions of words, which can be read aloud instead of just offering alternative words. The organisational aspects of the software also allow students to structure their work better. The fact that their work can be read back to them for proof-reading is very valuable.
The software has only recently been installed at Leeds College of Art and will take some time to embed into the College. We are currently encouraging staff and students to use it more, and this is something that will take a little time. However, some students already say that their life has changed considerably by using Read&Write software”.
PR Log (Press Release) – Feb 24, 2010 – Leeds College of Art has recently installed Read&Write Assistive software on the Colleges’ computer network to support the work of dyslexic students within the College.
The College provides for both further and higher education through its National Diplomas and 12 degree programs. Being a Specialist Arts College, there are quite a number of students with specific difficulties, which Frances Bosley (Learning Development Manager at Leeds College) says is the main reason behind the purchase of Read&Write software.
Frances commented “With being an Art College a lot of the work is practical, but there are also some written aspects, for example students have to complete essays and complete a dissertation and this is when Read&Write software is beneficial. Some courses are also more IT focused which lend themselves especially to using the software”.
Read&Write GOLD is Texthelp’s award-winning literacy support software designed to assist students with literacy difficulties. The software works discreetly with all mainstream Windows applications (including MS Vista), allowing users the opportunity to work in an inclusive manner alongside their colleagues. Read&Write improves access to Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) and Digital Exams.
Read&Write GOLD is easy to use and features include: Screen Masking (to tint or mask sections of the window), Texthelp Voices (new text-to-speech voices), a Translator which translates selected words into French, Spanish, German or Italian, enhanced Spelling, Dictionary & Homophone support, and the software echoes back Dragon text.
Frances continues: “The students like the advanced Spell Check feature which is helpful because it provides definitions of words, which can be read aloud instead of just offering alternative words. The organisational aspects of the software also allow students to structure their work better. The fact that their work can be read back to them for proof-reading is very valuable.
The software has only recently been installed at Leeds College of Art and will take some time to embed into the College. We are currently encouraging staff and students to use it more, and this is something that will take a little time. However, some students already say that their life has changed considerably by using Read&Write software”.
Travel apps help you go, stay, dine, shop, translate ...
From http://www.vancouversun.com/travel/Travel+apps+help+stay+dine+shop+translate/2602263/story.html
Travel apps help you go, stay, dine, shop, translate ...
And they're much easier to carry and use than an armload of dictionaries, maps and schedules
By Ruby Turner, Special to Canwest News Service
Wondering what makes a good travel app? Travel enthusiasts who embrace this technology consider a good travel app to be one that displays precise facts in an easy-to-read format. Simplicity is the gold standard. BlackBerry and iPhone/iPod Touch users have embraced this new travel tool but face a challenge in finding the app that best suits their individual needs.
Most business travellers consider their apps as a personal assistant that keeps them up to date with meeting schedules, flight times, hotel and car bookings. These apps provide pertinent details if there is a need to revise plans during the trip and are usually pre-programmed for constant communication.
Apps have quite a different use for the vacationing travellers. Often plans are either set or wide open, so there is no need to be in constant touch with airports and hotels. For these travellers, apps are a bonus with a wealth of information. Choosing the right apps means not having to take along ripped pages from heavy travel books, large expensive maps and hard-to-read timetables of planes and trains.
The following categories are listed on www.appsafari.com and www.bestappsite.com as the most sought-after travel apps. Many apps are free, but you might want to consider add-ons. Check the lists and see which apps best suit your travel needs.
Navigation is the most popular choice. It is very convenient to have a hand-held GPS device when walking around large cities. It is fine to stroll down side streets to sightsee, but there will be times when you want to know the most direct and quickest way to a destination.
Metro transportation apps for major cities give up-to-date times and schedules. Provide an address, and the app will indicate the closest stations. The trip planner will then automatically find the best route. These apps are constantly updated, and you will be alerted if there is a reduction or cancellation of services on your route.
Currency exchange apps make for stress-free shopping and dining. These apps are particularly helpful if you are dealing in a currency other than the U.S. or Canadian dollar or euro. Currency apps include a calculator and alert you when you have reached your budget limit.
Universal translator apps are worthwhile for travel to a place where English isn't spoken. You can translate words, phrases and sentences. Some apps have an text-to-speech option so you can type in a word or phrase and have it spoken.
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
Travel apps help you go, stay, dine, shop, translate ...
And they're much easier to carry and use than an armload of dictionaries, maps and schedules
By Ruby Turner, Special to Canwest News Service
Wondering what makes a good travel app? Travel enthusiasts who embrace this technology consider a good travel app to be one that displays precise facts in an easy-to-read format. Simplicity is the gold standard. BlackBerry and iPhone/iPod Touch users have embraced this new travel tool but face a challenge in finding the app that best suits their individual needs.
Most business travellers consider their apps as a personal assistant that keeps them up to date with meeting schedules, flight times, hotel and car bookings. These apps provide pertinent details if there is a need to revise plans during the trip and are usually pre-programmed for constant communication.
Apps have quite a different use for the vacationing travellers. Often plans are either set or wide open, so there is no need to be in constant touch with airports and hotels. For these travellers, apps are a bonus with a wealth of information. Choosing the right apps means not having to take along ripped pages from heavy travel books, large expensive maps and hard-to-read timetables of planes and trains.
The following categories are listed on www.appsafari.com and www.bestappsite.com as the most sought-after travel apps. Many apps are free, but you might want to consider add-ons. Check the lists and see which apps best suit your travel needs.
Navigation is the most popular choice. It is very convenient to have a hand-held GPS device when walking around large cities. It is fine to stroll down side streets to sightsee, but there will be times when you want to know the most direct and quickest way to a destination.
Metro transportation apps for major cities give up-to-date times and schedules. Provide an address, and the app will indicate the closest stations. The trip planner will then automatically find the best route. These apps are constantly updated, and you will be alerted if there is a reduction or cancellation of services on your route.
Currency exchange apps make for stress-free shopping and dining. These apps are particularly helpful if you are dealing in a currency other than the U.S. or Canadian dollar or euro. Currency apps include a calculator and alert you when you have reached your budget limit.
Universal translator apps are worthwhile for travel to a place where English isn't spoken. You can translate words, phrases and sentences. Some apps have an text-to-speech option so you can type in a word or phrase and have it spoken.
© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service
Clemson Researchers Deliver Hands-Free, Speech-Enabled Messaging
From http://www.speechtechmag.com/Articles/News/News-Feature/Clemson-Researchers-Deliver-Hands-Free,-Speech-Enabled-Messaging-61184.aspx
By Adam Boretz - Posted Feb 18, 2010
Professor Juan Gilbert and a team of researchers at Clemson University developed a hands-free solution that allows drivers to send messages—all via the power of their voice—while driving.
The application, VoiceTEXT, enables drivers to simply switch cell phones into Bluetooth mode, connect to cars, and speak messages. With VoiceTEXT, drivers are able to issue simple voice commands to record, deliver, listen to, and reply to voice messages. Additionally, the solution—built on the Voxeo platform—allows users to receive an accompanying text message and email with each voice message. Users can even choose to receive transcriptions of messages.
Gilbert—chairman of the human-centered computing division of Clemson’s School of Computing—says the system can be tailored to the needs of the user and his location: in the car, in a meeting, etc.
“You can set your settings [based] on how you want to receive information—either auditory or visual—and then react accordingly,” Gilbert says.
According to Gilbert, VoiceTEXT is different from other solutions on the market. With his offering, a user can record a voice message and instruct the system to call the recipient; the recipient is then able to answer the call, hear the message, and reply without ever touching the phone.
“The unique thing is we’re using the phone line versus the SMS,” he says. “It actually calls the recipient.”
Gilbert says the impetus for VoiceTEXT was increasing awareness about the dangers of texting while driving. He says that while people are learning about the dangerous of texting while driving, the practice persists and is usually discovered only after an accident.
Gilbert suggests the issue is one of enforcement. He notes that 19 states have passed legislation banning texting while driving, but a problem remains: how to execute the law. With VoiceTEXT, drivers will have another, safer option.
“For us the safety is it keeps your eyes on the road, your hands on the steering wheel,” he says, noting that studies show that even talking while driving can be distracting. “We believe this technology will be less distracting than carrying on a conversation because you're actually just sending a short message rather than conversing.”
And while, VoiceTEXT may make driving safer, not everyone is convinced it will make it safe enough.
In an email to Speech Technology, Jim Larson—a speech application consultant, co-chair of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Voice Browser Working Group, and program chair of SpeechTEK Europe 2010—expressed excitement about the solution, but remained concerned about safety issues associated with the use of mobile devices while driving.
“My real concern is that there are two aspects to using computers while driving,” writes Larson, “taking your eyes off of the road to look at the screen [and] the cognitive overload to the driver's brain. This experiment deals only with the first aspect and not the second, which is also a big factor.”
VoiceTEXT has been in pilot testing for two months. Gilbert and his team will now launch a study of the solution via a driving simulator on the Clemson campus. Additionally, he holds a provisional patent on the technology and is making it available for licensing.
“We found that people liked this approach,” Gilbert says. “We believe it is safer than texting and we believe it’s safer than having a conversation on the phone and we’re going to study that.”
By Adam Boretz - Posted Feb 18, 2010
Professor Juan Gilbert and a team of researchers at Clemson University developed a hands-free solution that allows drivers to send messages—all via the power of their voice—while driving.
The application, VoiceTEXT, enables drivers to simply switch cell phones into Bluetooth mode, connect to cars, and speak messages. With VoiceTEXT, drivers are able to issue simple voice commands to record, deliver, listen to, and reply to voice messages. Additionally, the solution—built on the Voxeo platform—allows users to receive an accompanying text message and email with each voice message. Users can even choose to receive transcriptions of messages.
Gilbert—chairman of the human-centered computing division of Clemson’s School of Computing—says the system can be tailored to the needs of the user and his location: in the car, in a meeting, etc.
“You can set your settings [based] on how you want to receive information—either auditory or visual—and then react accordingly,” Gilbert says.
According to Gilbert, VoiceTEXT is different from other solutions on the market. With his offering, a user can record a voice message and instruct the system to call the recipient; the recipient is then able to answer the call, hear the message, and reply without ever touching the phone.
“The unique thing is we’re using the phone line versus the SMS,” he says. “It actually calls the recipient.”
Gilbert says the impetus for VoiceTEXT was increasing awareness about the dangers of texting while driving. He says that while people are learning about the dangerous of texting while driving, the practice persists and is usually discovered only after an accident.
Gilbert suggests the issue is one of enforcement. He notes that 19 states have passed legislation banning texting while driving, but a problem remains: how to execute the law. With VoiceTEXT, drivers will have another, safer option.
“For us the safety is it keeps your eyes on the road, your hands on the steering wheel,” he says, noting that studies show that even talking while driving can be distracting. “We believe this technology will be less distracting than carrying on a conversation because you're actually just sending a short message rather than conversing.”
And while, VoiceTEXT may make driving safer, not everyone is convinced it will make it safe enough.
In an email to Speech Technology, Jim Larson—a speech application consultant, co-chair of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Voice Browser Working Group, and program chair of SpeechTEK Europe 2010—expressed excitement about the solution, but remained concerned about safety issues associated with the use of mobile devices while driving.
“My real concern is that there are two aspects to using computers while driving,” writes Larson, “taking your eyes off of the road to look at the screen [and] the cognitive overload to the driver's brain. This experiment deals only with the first aspect and not the second, which is also a big factor.”
VoiceTEXT has been in pilot testing for two months. Gilbert and his team will now launch a study of the solution via a driving simulator on the Clemson campus. Additionally, he holds a provisional patent on the technology and is making it available for licensing.
“We found that people liked this approach,” Gilbert says. “We believe it is safer than texting and we believe it’s safer than having a conversation on the phone and we’re going to study that.”
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Is There A Hand Held Device That Can Read Books/text Books To You?
From http://www.chemicalall.com/device/is-there-a-hand-held-device-that-can-read-bookstext-books-to-you.html
Question:
I’m in college and taking some online classes. I understand material better when it is spoken to me. I’m looking for a portable device that can read the textbooks to me. Any ideas?
Answer:
Nonsound on February 23rd, 2010 at 12:29 pm
You’re looking for what’s known as “text-to-audio” or “text-to-speech”.
Most PC/electronics stores have e-books (OfficeMax, Circuit City, etc) which, depending on your budget, will have an audio option.
Otherwise you can use any run-of-the-mill laptop & pick the text-to-audio software that works best for you.
Here’s an example:
http://www.nextuptech.com/
The only downside to this is that the book MUST be in a digital format; currently there is no reliable devices that can read physical textbooks. If that’s the case, you’re much better off finding a study buddy or trying to find a digital copy of your textbook.
Question:
I’m in college and taking some online classes. I understand material better when it is spoken to me. I’m looking for a portable device that can read the textbooks to me. Any ideas?
Answer:
Nonsound on February 23rd, 2010 at 12:29 pm
You’re looking for what’s known as “text-to-audio” or “text-to-speech”.
Most PC/electronics stores have e-books (OfficeMax, Circuit City, etc) which, depending on your budget, will have an audio option.
Otherwise you can use any run-of-the-mill laptop & pick the text-to-audio software that works best for you.
Here’s an example:
http://www.nextuptech.com/
The only downside to this is that the book MUST be in a digital format; currently there is no reliable devices that can read physical textbooks. If that’s the case, you’re much better off finding a study buddy or trying to find a digital copy of your textbook.
Android SMS Speaker, Hear Your Text Messages
From http://www.morninpaper.com/2010/02/android-sms-speaker-hear-your-text-messages/
Not happy with your Android Voice control? Need a little multi-lingual help? Have a look at ‘Android SMS Speaker’. It’s a great idea to have voice control while driving, this way you make it to your destination instead of the alternative due to an incoming text you really need to read. Android SMS Speaker will help users keep their eyes on the road, while getting shopping list instructions from home.
Android SMS Speaker version 1.0 is multi-lingual Text to Speech application that fetches incoming SMS and allows for play back, similar to a voice message system, and it’s easy to use.
Features:
Text-To-Speech (TTS) ready
SMS
Multi-language support
Works with
Acer: Acer Liquid
HTC: HTC Nexus One, HTC Passion, HTC Tattoo
Lenovo: Lenovo LePhone
Motorola: Motorola Backflip, Motorola DEVOUR A555, Motorola Droid, Motorola Milestone, Motorola XT720 MOTOROI, Motorola XT800 Zhishang
Samsung: Samsung SCH-i899, Samsung SGH-t939 Behold II
Sony Ericsson: Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 / X10i
T-Mobile: T-Mobile G1, T-Mobile myTouch 3G
$9.99
Android SMS Speaker
Not happy with your Android Voice control? Need a little multi-lingual help? Have a look at ‘Android SMS Speaker’. It’s a great idea to have voice control while driving, this way you make it to your destination instead of the alternative due to an incoming text you really need to read. Android SMS Speaker will help users keep their eyes on the road, while getting shopping list instructions from home.
Android SMS Speaker version 1.0 is multi-lingual Text to Speech application that fetches incoming SMS and allows for play back, similar to a voice message system, and it’s easy to use.
Features:
Text-To-Speech (TTS) ready
SMS
Multi-language support
Works with
Acer: Acer Liquid
HTC: HTC Nexus One, HTC Passion, HTC Tattoo
Lenovo: Lenovo LePhone
Motorola: Motorola Backflip, Motorola DEVOUR A555, Motorola Droid, Motorola Milestone, Motorola XT720 MOTOROI, Motorola XT800 Zhishang
Samsung: Samsung SCH-i899, Samsung SGH-t939 Behold II
Sony Ericsson: Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 / X10i
T-Mobile: T-Mobile G1, T-Mobile myTouch 3G
$9.99
Android SMS Speaker
Capitol to host Braille exhibit
From http://www.theolympian.com/2010/02/23/1149241/capitol-to-host-braille-exhibit.html
A traveling display highlighting Louis Braille will be featured in Olympia in March. The 20-panel display will take viewers through the highlights of Braille’s life, the braille production process, and why this form of reading remains important today.
The exhibit was produced by the National Braille Press. It is sponsored by the Washington Talking Book & Braille Library (WTBBL), Washington State Library and Washington State Heritage Center.
“This exhibit is a great opportunity to celebrate Louis Braille’s extraordinary life and learn how his reading system made it possible for blind and visually impaired people to enjoy literature,” said Secretary of State Sam Reed in a prepared statement.
The exhibit will be shown March 1-15 on the third floor of the Legislative Building.
“I think my main hope for what people take away from visiting the exhibit is to recognize the importance and value that braille plays in the everyday life of blind people,” said Danielle Miller, program manager for WTBBL, which is part of the Washington State Library in the Office of Secretary of State.
On Tuesday (March 2), the library will have a table next to the exhibit where WTBBL staff will have examples of materials in braille, as well as braille fortune cookies. There also will be blind volunteers who can braille names or phrases for people who visit the table. A special event honoring Louis Braille and his reading invention will take place that day from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., with state legislators and the public invited. Secretary Reed will be among the speakers at a 12:30 p.m. ceremony recognizing the exhibit.
“Louis Braille’s invention made literacy possible for millions of people around the world,” Miller said. “He provided blind people with an important gift that allows them to read, write and stay more connected with the world around them. Unfortunately, there has been a decrease in the number of blind individuals who learn braille, partly due to fewer teachers and an increase in text-to-speech technology. This exhibit is a reminder of how important a role that braille can play in the lives of the blind or visually impaired.” Louis Braille was born in France on January 4, 1809. He became blind at age 3 when he accidently stabbed himself in one eye with a tool and got an infection. The other eye went blind when the infection spread.
The bright, creative student earned a scholarship to the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris. At 15, he devised what is now known as braille, widely used by blind and visually impaired people for reading and writing. Braille is read by passing the fingers over characters made up of an arrangement of one to six embossed points. It has been adapted to almost every known language, as well as music, mathematics and science.
A traveling display highlighting Louis Braille will be featured in Olympia in March. The 20-panel display will take viewers through the highlights of Braille’s life, the braille production process, and why this form of reading remains important today.
The exhibit was produced by the National Braille Press. It is sponsored by the Washington Talking Book & Braille Library (WTBBL), Washington State Library and Washington State Heritage Center.
“This exhibit is a great opportunity to celebrate Louis Braille’s extraordinary life and learn how his reading system made it possible for blind and visually impaired people to enjoy literature,” said Secretary of State Sam Reed in a prepared statement.
The exhibit will be shown March 1-15 on the third floor of the Legislative Building.
“I think my main hope for what people take away from visiting the exhibit is to recognize the importance and value that braille plays in the everyday life of blind people,” said Danielle Miller, program manager for WTBBL, which is part of the Washington State Library in the Office of Secretary of State.
On Tuesday (March 2), the library will have a table next to the exhibit where WTBBL staff will have examples of materials in braille, as well as braille fortune cookies. There also will be blind volunteers who can braille names or phrases for people who visit the table. A special event honoring Louis Braille and his reading invention will take place that day from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., with state legislators and the public invited. Secretary Reed will be among the speakers at a 12:30 p.m. ceremony recognizing the exhibit.
“Louis Braille’s invention made literacy possible for millions of people around the world,” Miller said. “He provided blind people with an important gift that allows them to read, write and stay more connected with the world around them. Unfortunately, there has been a decrease in the number of blind individuals who learn braille, partly due to fewer teachers and an increase in text-to-speech technology. This exhibit is a reminder of how important a role that braille can play in the lives of the blind or visually impaired.” Louis Braille was born in France on January 4, 1809. He became blind at age 3 when he accidently stabbed himself in one eye with a tool and got an infection. The other eye went blind when the infection spread.
The bright, creative student earned a scholarship to the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris. At 15, he devised what is now known as braille, widely used by blind and visually impaired people for reading and writing. Braille is read by passing the fingers over characters made up of an arrangement of one to six embossed points. It has been adapted to almost every known language, as well as music, mathematics and science.
Super Text To Speech
From http://www.androlib.com/android.application.alliance-stts-android-itDC.aspx
Now Ad Free!
With this app you can amaze(or annoy) your friends!
Super features:
-choose your locale
-pitch and speed control
-save to sd card
-email to a friend
Want to use the built in Spanish pronunciations? No problemo!
Want to make your android sound like a ... well an android? I WILL OBEY
Super Text To Speech was developed for Android by Brew Engine
Package name : alliance.stts.android
Now Ad Free!
With this app you can amaze(or annoy) your friends!
Super features:
-choose your locale
-pitch and speed control
-save to sd card
-email to a friend
Want to use the built in Spanish pronunciations? No problemo!
Want to make your android sound like a ... well an android? I WILL OBEY
Super Text To Speech was developed for Android by Brew Engine
Package name : alliance.stts.android
TEAM International launches iReminder app for iPhones
From http://www.i-newswire.com/team-international-launches-ireminder/23281
TEAM International proudly introduces the iReminder application. It has now become possible to place a call in the future and set up an iReminder.
(I-Newswire) February 22, 2010 - Have you ever forgotten an anniversary or a birthday? Have you ever been asked to remind someone of an activity? Have you ever missed your daughter’s ballet recital? Have you ever needed a reminder for something in the future but wanted a chance to do it now? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this application has been designed for you!
iReminder is an application developed by TEAM International in partnership with iTMP and designed for iPhone/iPod Touch that let’s you place a call in the future.
You can choose from a variety of preset reminders including birthdays, deadlines, anniversaries, payments, oil change reminders and simple “wake up calls”.
Customers can choose text-to-speech or pre-recorded reminders that are delivered via multiple alternatives customized by the end user.
TEAM International proudly introduces the iReminder application. It has now become possible to place a call in the future and set up an iReminder.
(I-Newswire) February 22, 2010 - Have you ever forgotten an anniversary or a birthday? Have you ever been asked to remind someone of an activity? Have you ever missed your daughter’s ballet recital? Have you ever needed a reminder for something in the future but wanted a chance to do it now? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this application has been designed for you!
iReminder is an application developed by TEAM International in partnership with iTMP and designed for iPhone/iPod Touch that let’s you place a call in the future.
You can choose from a variety of preset reminders including birthdays, deadlines, anniversaries, payments, oil change reminders and simple “wake up calls”.
Customers can choose text-to-speech or pre-recorded reminders that are delivered via multiple alternatives customized by the end user.
The Changing Voice of Voice Mail
From http://www.nojitter.com/blog/archives/2010/02/the_changing_vo.html;jsessionid=B1OFIJ4H33XMDQE1GHPSKHWATMY32JVN
Posted by Blair Pleasant, COMMfusion/UCStrategies | Feb 22, 2010
At VoiceCon Orlando, Marty Parker and I will be moderating a panel discussion about "How Much Voice Mail Do You Really Need?" with speakers from AVST, Avaya, Cisco and Microsoft. The session’s premise is that even though the need for voice mail is changing significantly due to evolving voice-calling patterns and the availability of alternative communication modes, voice mail remains an important tool for controlling costs, serving customers and enhancing workflows.
The result is new voice mail requirements as well as new products. There is a new breed of voice messaging systems that focus on call answering, notification, and voice services, as well as unified messaging systems that offer mobile notification and speech-to-text capabilities, plus voice portals that offer speech attendants and application options.
We now have more communication and messaging options than ever before--instant messaging and email are taking over as the primary messaging modes, as the use of voice mail decreases. If you were asked which messaging mode you would be willing to give up for a week, I bet it would be voice mail--followed by IM and lastly email. It's hard to get work done without access to email, but many of us go days without receiving a voice mail message, especially for our office phones.
Often times when people make a phone call and don't reach the intended recipient at their home or office, they hang up and call that person's cell phone and leave a message there if there's no answer. The need for true voice messaging--providing the ability to log in, to record and send a message to one or more addresses, to forward stored voice messages between users and to broadcast messages--as opposed to telephone answering--recording a message from the caller to a busy or unanswered number--has also decreased. If a broadcast message needs to be distributed among workers, it's likely to be an email rather than a voice message. And increasingly, voice messages that need to be distributed are sent as email attachments.
In the past few years, voice mail has become a commodity, a feature of other applications such as telephony, with little if any price premium for basic functionality. Users will continue to pay for unified messaging, but UM prices have dropped considerably in the past two years, thanks mostly to Microsoft's introduction of Unified Messaging in Exchange with speech interface capabilities for only $25/seat.
Additionally, many of the functions that were previously associated with unified messaging are now part of a unified communications solution. Advanced features such as find me/follow me became part of vendors’ PBX function or of the UC mobility offerings, and are less specific to the messaging platform.
On the bright side, unified messaging has garnered more attention and customers have more options now than ever before. Thanks to the iPhone, visual voice mail is becoming all the rage. Of course this is a capability that has been part of UM systems for years, but now people expect to see their voice mail messages in visual form in their inbox.
Calendar integration and speech technologies (text-to-speech to translate email messages into speech, and for speech command and control of messaging capabilities) will continue to be add-on enhancements for those who need it, providing enhanced value to UM systems.
There are also new developments and integrations that are making unified messaging solutions more powerful. By integrating the enterprise's presence solution with its voice mail systems, presence capabilities get tied in to the user's mailbox, providing more compelling functionality. For example, when I receive a voice message from Marty, I can see his presence status and availability next to his name in my inbox, and if the system is unified communications-enabled, I can click on his name and be connected via click-to-call capabilities.
Posted by Blair Pleasant, COMMfusion/UCStrategies | Feb 22, 2010
At VoiceCon Orlando, Marty Parker and I will be moderating a panel discussion about "How Much Voice Mail Do You Really Need?" with speakers from AVST, Avaya, Cisco and Microsoft. The session’s premise is that even though the need for voice mail is changing significantly due to evolving voice-calling patterns and the availability of alternative communication modes, voice mail remains an important tool for controlling costs, serving customers and enhancing workflows.
The result is new voice mail requirements as well as new products. There is a new breed of voice messaging systems that focus on call answering, notification, and voice services, as well as unified messaging systems that offer mobile notification and speech-to-text capabilities, plus voice portals that offer speech attendants and application options.
We now have more communication and messaging options than ever before--instant messaging and email are taking over as the primary messaging modes, as the use of voice mail decreases. If you were asked which messaging mode you would be willing to give up for a week, I bet it would be voice mail--followed by IM and lastly email. It's hard to get work done without access to email, but many of us go days without receiving a voice mail message, especially for our office phones.
Often times when people make a phone call and don't reach the intended recipient at their home or office, they hang up and call that person's cell phone and leave a message there if there's no answer. The need for true voice messaging--providing the ability to log in, to record and send a message to one or more addresses, to forward stored voice messages between users and to broadcast messages--as opposed to telephone answering--recording a message from the caller to a busy or unanswered number--has also decreased. If a broadcast message needs to be distributed among workers, it's likely to be an email rather than a voice message. And increasingly, voice messages that need to be distributed are sent as email attachments.
In the past few years, voice mail has become a commodity, a feature of other applications such as telephony, with little if any price premium for basic functionality. Users will continue to pay for unified messaging, but UM prices have dropped considerably in the past two years, thanks mostly to Microsoft's introduction of Unified Messaging in Exchange with speech interface capabilities for only $25/seat.
Additionally, many of the functions that were previously associated with unified messaging are now part of a unified communications solution. Advanced features such as find me/follow me became part of vendors’ PBX function or of the UC mobility offerings, and are less specific to the messaging platform.
On the bright side, unified messaging has garnered more attention and customers have more options now than ever before. Thanks to the iPhone, visual voice mail is becoming all the rage. Of course this is a capability that has been part of UM systems for years, but now people expect to see their voice mail messages in visual form in their inbox.
Calendar integration and speech technologies (text-to-speech to translate email messages into speech, and for speech command and control of messaging capabilities) will continue to be add-on enhancements for those who need it, providing enhanced value to UM systems.
There are also new developments and integrations that are making unified messaging solutions more powerful. By integrating the enterprise's presence solution with its voice mail systems, presence capabilities get tied in to the user's mailbox, providing more compelling functionality. For example, when I receive a voice message from Marty, I can see his presence status and availability next to his name in my inbox, and if the system is unified communications-enabled, I can click on his name and be connected via click-to-call capabilities.
Monday, February 22, 2010
'There's no stopping that kid'
From http://www.rep-am.com/news/local/doc4b81e186346b4384303013.txt
Bristol man, blinded in workplace accident, seeks new home for self, children in Litchfield County
BRISTOL -- Jim Sadecki's living room is decorated with family photos, mementos of his Air Force career, and the stuffed head of the first buck he killed after losing his eyes.
In the five years since an industrial accident blinded Sadecki, 33, he has climbed to the summit of Wildcat Mountain in New Hampshire during winter, run road races and learned to shoot rifles, pistols and a hunting bow with a little help from family and friends.
“That was one of my hobbies that I got much relief from,” Sadecki said.
Sadecki's 10-year Air Force career included three deployments to the Middle East. A photograph of Balad Air Force Base in Iraq, a military identification card, and a brass plaque identifying the former staff sergeant as a “jack of all trades” are enshrined in a glass case on the living room wall above the mantle.
He was a competitive marksman who served on Emergency Services Units -- military versions of SWAT teams -- and learned to use laser sights that have come into play as he has learned to shoot with other people's eyes watching a red dot and directing Sadecki's aim up, down, left or right.
He built this ability with Internet research, adapting laser sights already on the market for use with his bow. He now aims to build a home in Litchfield County, and is closing in on a couple of possibilities, land where he can blaze trails through the woods and set up a shooting range.
“I have a digital compass that talks in degrees,” Sadecki said. “All these small things help me to be more independent.”
Sadecki seeks a place where he can teach his children, Carson, 9, and Adlih, 7, to fish and find their way in the woods. He has enlisted the services of West Hartford architect Neal Zimmerman and collaborator Todd Rosenblum in Spring Valley, N.Y., specialists in accessible design, to design a home with features including doorways without steps, flat thresholds, rounded corners on counters and walls and automated controls. He already has a talking thermostat, talking clocks and an iPhone that can photograph a restaurant menu and read it aloud.
'They had to rebuild all of that'
Sadecki learned in the fall of 2004 that his father, Charles, was dying of cancer.
“At the time I was married, and we decided to get out and come back to Connecticut so I could help take care of my mother and father and spend time with the kids,” he said. He returned in August, and his honorable discharge quickly followed.
He took a job in construction, though he is not at liberty to identify his employer. A confidentially agreement precludes disclosure of many details of the accident on Sept. 8, 2004, Sadecki said, or the terms of any agreement that may have followed.
A steel cable snapped under heavy strain and fragments of metal or the cable itself lashed across his face.
“More or less I got hit right across the bridge of the nose,” he said. “It lacerated both eyes, more or less it vaporized the bridge of my nose. They had to rebuild all of that.”
Surgeons replaced his ruined eyes with plastic prosthetics, which appear remarkably natural and move to track sources of sound. Doctors left a thin scar as the only immediately obvious evidence of what Sadecki lost: his sight, smell and, to some extent, his sense of taste. Until he picks up his white cane, that is, a cane that is both a navigational aid and a bar to basic human interaction.
“People feel uncomfortable to talk to you,” he said, adding that his sense of humor comes in handy. “Sometimes, it's just making a joke that breaks the ice.”
A photo of Sadecki atop Wildcat Mountain taken by his brother, Mark, shows a smiling, rugged, 6-feet-4-inch man holding a sign that reads, “FOLLOW A DREAM,” a tribute to Jay Blake, a friend and the only blind crew chief working in auto racing. It was a cloudy day in New Hampshire, Jan. 22, 2006, though mountain peaks are easily visible in the background. On the back of the sign Sadecki wrote “ZERO VISIBILITY.”
'There's no stopping that kid.'
“It took, I think, a snowstorm to get me out of my shell,” Sadecki said, recalling a winter day following his accident and his father's death, when his mother, Francine, struggled to start the snow blower. “I told her get in the house, I'm snow blowing the driveway.”
Sadecki worked out a system: Starting at the garage, “I make everything squares,” he said, following a series of right-angle turns around the driveway of a home he has lived in since age 11 and purchased from his parents after leaving the Air Force.
“It's amazing what you can feel,” he said. “Through my feet, through the snow blower.”
Clearing the driveway inspired Sadecki to take on more challenging tasks. Using a computer that transforms text to speech, he navigated Web sites to learn about laser sights used by blind people to shoot guns and bows while a spotter watches a red dot on a target and gives directions.
Mark Sadecki of Watertown, Mass., Jim's older brother by three years, said he's not a fan of firearms or hunting, but he supports his brother's pursuits.
“There's no stopping that kid. If he puts his mind to something he's going to get it done,” Mark Sadecki said. “He's always done a really good job of making safety his number one priority.”
Bristol man, blinded in workplace accident, seeks new home for self, children in Litchfield County
BRISTOL -- Jim Sadecki's living room is decorated with family photos, mementos of his Air Force career, and the stuffed head of the first buck he killed after losing his eyes.
In the five years since an industrial accident blinded Sadecki, 33, he has climbed to the summit of Wildcat Mountain in New Hampshire during winter, run road races and learned to shoot rifles, pistols and a hunting bow with a little help from family and friends.
“That was one of my hobbies that I got much relief from,” Sadecki said.
Sadecki's 10-year Air Force career included three deployments to the Middle East. A photograph of Balad Air Force Base in Iraq, a military identification card, and a brass plaque identifying the former staff sergeant as a “jack of all trades” are enshrined in a glass case on the living room wall above the mantle.
He was a competitive marksman who served on Emergency Services Units -- military versions of SWAT teams -- and learned to use laser sights that have come into play as he has learned to shoot with other people's eyes watching a red dot and directing Sadecki's aim up, down, left or right.
He built this ability with Internet research, adapting laser sights already on the market for use with his bow. He now aims to build a home in Litchfield County, and is closing in on a couple of possibilities, land where he can blaze trails through the woods and set up a shooting range.
“I have a digital compass that talks in degrees,” Sadecki said. “All these small things help me to be more independent.”
Sadecki seeks a place where he can teach his children, Carson, 9, and Adlih, 7, to fish and find their way in the woods. He has enlisted the services of West Hartford architect Neal Zimmerman and collaborator Todd Rosenblum in Spring Valley, N.Y., specialists in accessible design, to design a home with features including doorways without steps, flat thresholds, rounded corners on counters and walls and automated controls. He already has a talking thermostat, talking clocks and an iPhone that can photograph a restaurant menu and read it aloud.
'They had to rebuild all of that'
Sadecki learned in the fall of 2004 that his father, Charles, was dying of cancer.
“At the time I was married, and we decided to get out and come back to Connecticut so I could help take care of my mother and father and spend time with the kids,” he said. He returned in August, and his honorable discharge quickly followed.
He took a job in construction, though he is not at liberty to identify his employer. A confidentially agreement precludes disclosure of many details of the accident on Sept. 8, 2004, Sadecki said, or the terms of any agreement that may have followed.
A steel cable snapped under heavy strain and fragments of metal or the cable itself lashed across his face.
“More or less I got hit right across the bridge of the nose,” he said. “It lacerated both eyes, more or less it vaporized the bridge of my nose. They had to rebuild all of that.”
Surgeons replaced his ruined eyes with plastic prosthetics, which appear remarkably natural and move to track sources of sound. Doctors left a thin scar as the only immediately obvious evidence of what Sadecki lost: his sight, smell and, to some extent, his sense of taste. Until he picks up his white cane, that is, a cane that is both a navigational aid and a bar to basic human interaction.
“People feel uncomfortable to talk to you,” he said, adding that his sense of humor comes in handy. “Sometimes, it's just making a joke that breaks the ice.”
A photo of Sadecki atop Wildcat Mountain taken by his brother, Mark, shows a smiling, rugged, 6-feet-4-inch man holding a sign that reads, “FOLLOW A DREAM,” a tribute to Jay Blake, a friend and the only blind crew chief working in auto racing. It was a cloudy day in New Hampshire, Jan. 22, 2006, though mountain peaks are easily visible in the background. On the back of the sign Sadecki wrote “ZERO VISIBILITY.”
'There's no stopping that kid.'
“It took, I think, a snowstorm to get me out of my shell,” Sadecki said, recalling a winter day following his accident and his father's death, when his mother, Francine, struggled to start the snow blower. “I told her get in the house, I'm snow blowing the driveway.”
Sadecki worked out a system: Starting at the garage, “I make everything squares,” he said, following a series of right-angle turns around the driveway of a home he has lived in since age 11 and purchased from his parents after leaving the Air Force.
“It's amazing what you can feel,” he said. “Through my feet, through the snow blower.”
Clearing the driveway inspired Sadecki to take on more challenging tasks. Using a computer that transforms text to speech, he navigated Web sites to learn about laser sights used by blind people to shoot guns and bows while a spotter watches a red dot on a target and gives directions.
Mark Sadecki of Watertown, Mass., Jim's older brother by three years, said he's not a fan of firearms or hunting, but he supports his brother's pursuits.
“There's no stopping that kid. If he puts his mind to something he's going to get it done,” Mark Sadecki said. “He's always done a really good job of making safety his number one priority.”
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Sensory Speech Chip, Listens, Talks, Plays Music
From http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2359459,00.asp
by Mark Hachman
Sensory, which manufactures speech recognition chips for consumer electronics, on Tuesday announced the NLP-5X, a chip that recognizes and plays back speech, sound samples, and MIDI files, all for as little as $2.
The NLP-5x is the company's first to feature text-to-speech, using a voice-morphing algorithm that can generate thousands of voices on the fly, according to Todd Mozer, the company's chief executive.
Sensory counts major toy manufacturers like JVC, Mattel, and Hasbro among the company's customers, so the capabilities that the NLP-5X offers could show up in tomorrow's toys. In total, Sensory chips appears in between 30 to 40 products, over four generations of product. "But we decided it was time to rearchitect the whole chip," Mozer said.
The NLP-5X upgraded the chip's internal microcontrollers to a DSP, adding more MIPS horsepower, upgrading the analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog circuitry from 12- to 16-bit sensitivity.
There are two types of speech recognition: speaker-dependent, such as that provided by Nuance and its Dragon Naturally Speaking product. There, the PC or phone stores an enormous library of phonemes and words, but requires the system to "train" with the user to manage the complexity of the process. A speaker-independent system like Sensory manufactures allows a for a great deal of latitude in the input voice, and doesn't require training. But the available "vocabulary" is also much smaller.
Still, even speaker-independent systems can factor in complexity. "An oven is a good example," Mozer said. "It's quite complex on older chips, compared to what we can do today. On an oven, for example, the unit can ask you, 'What temperature do you want?'"
When a user replies, he might answer any of many possible combinations from roughly 100 degrees to 500 degrees, with some variance: "three-seventy-five," for example, or "three-seven-five," or "three hundred and seventy-five degrees". The user also can be asked how he wants the meal cooked - convection, baked, or broiled - and for how long. "The natural language function is the most unique feature of the chip," Mozer said.
With the addition of text-to-speech, that oven could go onto the Internet, find a recipe, and then read it to the user, Mozer added. The voice-morphing system allows it to speak thousands of voices, including male and female. But Mozer said that the company hasn't recorded a celebrity voice. A 24-voice MIDI synthesizer allows it to play back music or MP3 files. Sensory even built in a gesture interface, Mozer added.
An "incredible algorithm" also allows the chip to always be on, Mozer said, "listening" for commands, instead of requiring a button to be depressed. In certain cases, the NLP-5x can receive a "hint" that it might be needed; a Sensory chip inside a Bluetooth headset can be cued by the phone. Even a MIPS-intensive task requires just 30 microamps, Mozer said, extending battery life even further.
"We're far and away the leader in this space, and this is why," Mozer said.
by Mark Hachman
Sensory, which manufactures speech recognition chips for consumer electronics, on Tuesday announced the NLP-5X, a chip that recognizes and plays back speech, sound samples, and MIDI files, all for as little as $2.
The NLP-5x is the company's first to feature text-to-speech, using a voice-morphing algorithm that can generate thousands of voices on the fly, according to Todd Mozer, the company's chief executive.
Sensory counts major toy manufacturers like JVC, Mattel, and Hasbro among the company's customers, so the capabilities that the NLP-5X offers could show up in tomorrow's toys. In total, Sensory chips appears in between 30 to 40 products, over four generations of product. "But we decided it was time to rearchitect the whole chip," Mozer said.
The NLP-5X upgraded the chip's internal microcontrollers to a DSP, adding more MIPS horsepower, upgrading the analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog circuitry from 12- to 16-bit sensitivity.
There are two types of speech recognition: speaker-dependent, such as that provided by Nuance and its Dragon Naturally Speaking product. There, the PC or phone stores an enormous library of phonemes and words, but requires the system to "train" with the user to manage the complexity of the process. A speaker-independent system like Sensory manufactures allows a for a great deal of latitude in the input voice, and doesn't require training. But the available "vocabulary" is also much smaller.
Still, even speaker-independent systems can factor in complexity. "An oven is a good example," Mozer said. "It's quite complex on older chips, compared to what we can do today. On an oven, for example, the unit can ask you, 'What temperature do you want?'"
When a user replies, he might answer any of many possible combinations from roughly 100 degrees to 500 degrees, with some variance: "three-seventy-five," for example, or "three-seven-five," or "three hundred and seventy-five degrees". The user also can be asked how he wants the meal cooked - convection, baked, or broiled - and for how long. "The natural language function is the most unique feature of the chip," Mozer said.
With the addition of text-to-speech, that oven could go onto the Internet, find a recipe, and then read it to the user, Mozer added. The voice-morphing system allows it to speak thousands of voices, including male and female. But Mozer said that the company hasn't recorded a celebrity voice. A 24-voice MIDI synthesizer allows it to play back music or MP3 files. Sensory even built in a gesture interface, Mozer added.
An "incredible algorithm" also allows the chip to always be on, Mozer said, "listening" for commands, instead of requiring a button to be depressed. In certain cases, the NLP-5x can receive a "hint" that it might be needed; a Sensory chip inside a Bluetooth headset can be cued by the phone. Even a MIPS-intensive task requires just 30 microamps, Mozer said, extending battery life even further.
"We're far and away the leader in this space, and this is why," Mozer said.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Google's Alfred Spector on voice search, hybrid intelligence and beyond
From http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/google-s-alfred-spector-on-voice-search-hybrid-intelligence-and-beyond-669605
Inside Google Labs
By Oliver Lindberg
Google has always been tight-lipped about products that haven't launched yet. It's no secret, however, that thanks to the company's bottom-up culture, its engineers are working on tons of new projects at the same time.
Following the mantra of 'release early, release often', the speed at which the search engine giant is churning out tools is staggering. At the heart of it all is Alfred Spector, Google's Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives.
One of the areas Google is making significant advances in is voice search. Spector is astounded by how rapidly it's come along.
The Google Mobile App features 'search by voice' capabilities that are available for the iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Android. All versions understand English (including US, UK, Australian and Indian-English accents) but the latest addition, for Nokia S60 phones, even introduces Mandarin speech recognition, which – because of its many different accents and tonal characteristics – posed a huge engineering challenge.
It's the most spoken language in the world, but as it isn't exactly keyboard-friendly, voice search could become immensely popular in China.
Technology challenge
"Voice is one of these grand technology challenges in computer science," Spector explains. "Can a computer understand the human voice? It's been worked on for many decades and what we've realised over the last couple of years is that search, particularly on handheld devices, is amenable to voice as an import mechanism.
"It's very valuable to be able to use voice. All of us know that no matter how good the keyboard, it's tricky to type exactly the right thing into a searchbar, while holding your backpack and everything else."
To get a computer to take account of your voice is no mean feat, of course. "One idea is to take all of the voices that the system hears over time into one huge pan-human voice model. So, on the one hand we have a voice that's higher and with an English accent, and on the other hand my voice, which is deeper and with an American accent. They both go into one model, or it just becomes personalised to the individual; voice scientists are a little unclear as to which is the best approach."
Machine translation
The research department is also making progress in machine translation. Google Translate already features 51 languages, including Swahili and Yiddish. The latest version introduces instant, real-time translation, phonetic input and text-to-speech support (in English).
"We're able to go from any language to any of the others, and there are 51 times 50, so 2,550 possibilities," Spector explains.
"We're focusing on increasing the number of languages because we'd like to handle even those languages where there's not an enormous volume of usage. It will make the web far more valuable to more people if they can access the English-or Chinese language web, for example.
"But we also continue to focus on quality because almost always the translations are valuable but imperfect. Sometimes it comes from training our translation system over more raw data, so we have, say, EU documents in English and French and can compare them and learn rules for translation. The other approach is to bring more knowledge into translation.
"For example, we're using more syntactic knowledge today and doing automated parsing with language. It's been a grand challenge of the field since the late 1950s. Now it's finally achieved mass usage."
The team, led by scientist Franz Josef Och, has been collecting data for more than 100 languages, and the Google Translator Toolkit, which makes use of the 'wisdom of the crowds', now even supports 345 languages, many of which are minority languages.
The editor enables users to translate text, correct the automatic translation and publish it. Spector thinks that this approach is the future. As computers become even faster, handling more and more data – a lot of it in the cloud – machines learn from users and thus become smarter. He calls this concept 'hybrid intelligence'.
"It's very difficult to solve these technological problems without human input," he says. "It's hard to create a robot that's as clever, smart and knowledgeable of the world as we humans are. But it's not as tough to build a computational system like Google, which extends what we do greatly and gradually learns something about the world from us, but that requires our interpretation to make it really successful.
"We need to get computers and people communicating in both directions, so the computer learns from the human and makes the human more effective."
Examples of 'hybrid intelligence' are Google Suggest, which instantly offers popular searches as you type a search query, and the 'did you mean?' feature in Google search, which corrects you when you misspell a query in the searchbar. The more you use it, the better the system gets.
Training computers to become seemingly more intelligent poses major hurdles for Google's engineers. "Computers don't train as efficiently as people do," Spector explains.
"Let's take the chess example. If a Kasparov was the educator, we could count on almost anything he says as being accurate. But if you tried to learn from a million chess players, you learn from my children as well, who play chess but they're 10 and eight. They'll be right sometimes and not right other times. There's noise in that, and some of the noise is spam. One also has to have careful regard for privacy issues."
By collecting enormous amounts of data, Google hopes to create a powerful database that eventually will understand the relationship between words (for example, 'a dog is an animal' and 'a dog has four legs').
The challenge is to try to establish these relationships automatically, using tons of information, instead of having experts teach the system. This database would then improve search results and language translations because it would have a better understanding of the meaning of the words.
Conceptual search
There's also a lot of research around 'conceptual search'. "Let's take a video of a couple in front of the Empire State Building. We watch the video and it's clear they're on their honeymoon. But what is the video about? Is it about love or honeymoons, or is it about renting office space? It's a fundamentally challenging problem."
One example of conceptual search is Google Image Swirl, which was added to Labs in November. Enter a keyword and you get a list of 12 images; clicking on each one brings up a cluster of related pictures. Click on any of them to expand the 'wonder wheel' further.
Google notes that they're not just the most relevant images; the algorithm determines the most relevant group of images with similar appearance and meaning.
To improve the world's data, Google continues to focus on the importance of the open internet. Another Labs project, Google Fusion Tables facilitates data management in the cloud. It enables users to create tables, filter and aggregate data, merge it with other data sources and visualise it with Google Maps or the Google Visualisation API.
The data sets can then be published, shared or kept private and commented on by people around the world. "It's an example of open collaboration," Spector says.
"If it's public, we can crawl it to make it searchable and easily visible to people. We hired one of the best database researchers in the world, Alon Halevy, to lead it."
Google is aiming to make more information available more easily across multiple devices, whether it's images, videos, speech or maps, no matter which language we're using.
Spector calls the impact "totally transparent processing – it revolutionises the role of computation in day-today life. The computer can break down all these barriers to communication and knowledge. No matter what device we're using, we have access to things. We can do translations, there are books or government documents, and some day we hope to have medical records. Whatever you want, no matter where you are, you can find it."
Inside Google Labs
By Oliver Lindberg
Google has always been tight-lipped about products that haven't launched yet. It's no secret, however, that thanks to the company's bottom-up culture, its engineers are working on tons of new projects at the same time.
Following the mantra of 'release early, release often', the speed at which the search engine giant is churning out tools is staggering. At the heart of it all is Alfred Spector, Google's Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives.
One of the areas Google is making significant advances in is voice search. Spector is astounded by how rapidly it's come along.
The Google Mobile App features 'search by voice' capabilities that are available for the iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Android. All versions understand English (including US, UK, Australian and Indian-English accents) but the latest addition, for Nokia S60 phones, even introduces Mandarin speech recognition, which – because of its many different accents and tonal characteristics – posed a huge engineering challenge.
It's the most spoken language in the world, but as it isn't exactly keyboard-friendly, voice search could become immensely popular in China.
Technology challenge
"Voice is one of these grand technology challenges in computer science," Spector explains. "Can a computer understand the human voice? It's been worked on for many decades and what we've realised over the last couple of years is that search, particularly on handheld devices, is amenable to voice as an import mechanism.
"It's very valuable to be able to use voice. All of us know that no matter how good the keyboard, it's tricky to type exactly the right thing into a searchbar, while holding your backpack and everything else."
To get a computer to take account of your voice is no mean feat, of course. "One idea is to take all of the voices that the system hears over time into one huge pan-human voice model. So, on the one hand we have a voice that's higher and with an English accent, and on the other hand my voice, which is deeper and with an American accent. They both go into one model, or it just becomes personalised to the individual; voice scientists are a little unclear as to which is the best approach."
Machine translation
The research department is also making progress in machine translation. Google Translate already features 51 languages, including Swahili and Yiddish. The latest version introduces instant, real-time translation, phonetic input and text-to-speech support (in English).
"We're able to go from any language to any of the others, and there are 51 times 50, so 2,550 possibilities," Spector explains.
"We're focusing on increasing the number of languages because we'd like to handle even those languages where there's not an enormous volume of usage. It will make the web far more valuable to more people if they can access the English-or Chinese language web, for example.
"But we also continue to focus on quality because almost always the translations are valuable but imperfect. Sometimes it comes from training our translation system over more raw data, so we have, say, EU documents in English and French and can compare them and learn rules for translation. The other approach is to bring more knowledge into translation.
"For example, we're using more syntactic knowledge today and doing automated parsing with language. It's been a grand challenge of the field since the late 1950s. Now it's finally achieved mass usage."
The team, led by scientist Franz Josef Och, has been collecting data for more than 100 languages, and the Google Translator Toolkit, which makes use of the 'wisdom of the crowds', now even supports 345 languages, many of which are minority languages.
The editor enables users to translate text, correct the automatic translation and publish it. Spector thinks that this approach is the future. As computers become even faster, handling more and more data – a lot of it in the cloud – machines learn from users and thus become smarter. He calls this concept 'hybrid intelligence'.
"It's very difficult to solve these technological problems without human input," he says. "It's hard to create a robot that's as clever, smart and knowledgeable of the world as we humans are. But it's not as tough to build a computational system like Google, which extends what we do greatly and gradually learns something about the world from us, but that requires our interpretation to make it really successful.
"We need to get computers and people communicating in both directions, so the computer learns from the human and makes the human more effective."
Examples of 'hybrid intelligence' are Google Suggest, which instantly offers popular searches as you type a search query, and the 'did you mean?' feature in Google search, which corrects you when you misspell a query in the searchbar. The more you use it, the better the system gets.
Training computers to become seemingly more intelligent poses major hurdles for Google's engineers. "Computers don't train as efficiently as people do," Spector explains.
"Let's take the chess example. If a Kasparov was the educator, we could count on almost anything he says as being accurate. But if you tried to learn from a million chess players, you learn from my children as well, who play chess but they're 10 and eight. They'll be right sometimes and not right other times. There's noise in that, and some of the noise is spam. One also has to have careful regard for privacy issues."
By collecting enormous amounts of data, Google hopes to create a powerful database that eventually will understand the relationship between words (for example, 'a dog is an animal' and 'a dog has four legs').
The challenge is to try to establish these relationships automatically, using tons of information, instead of having experts teach the system. This database would then improve search results and language translations because it would have a better understanding of the meaning of the words.
Conceptual search
There's also a lot of research around 'conceptual search'. "Let's take a video of a couple in front of the Empire State Building. We watch the video and it's clear they're on their honeymoon. But what is the video about? Is it about love or honeymoons, or is it about renting office space? It's a fundamentally challenging problem."
One example of conceptual search is Google Image Swirl, which was added to Labs in November. Enter a keyword and you get a list of 12 images; clicking on each one brings up a cluster of related pictures. Click on any of them to expand the 'wonder wheel' further.
Google notes that they're not just the most relevant images; the algorithm determines the most relevant group of images with similar appearance and meaning.
To improve the world's data, Google continues to focus on the importance of the open internet. Another Labs project, Google Fusion Tables facilitates data management in the cloud. It enables users to create tables, filter and aggregate data, merge it with other data sources and visualise it with Google Maps or the Google Visualisation API.
The data sets can then be published, shared or kept private and commented on by people around the world. "It's an example of open collaboration," Spector says.
"If it's public, we can crawl it to make it searchable and easily visible to people. We hired one of the best database researchers in the world, Alon Halevy, to lead it."
Google is aiming to make more information available more easily across multiple devices, whether it's images, videos, speech or maps, no matter which language we're using.
Spector calls the impact "totally transparent processing – it revolutionises the role of computation in day-today life. The computer can break down all these barriers to communication and knowledge. No matter what device we're using, we have access to things. We can do translations, there are books or government documents, and some day we hope to have medical records. Whatever you want, no matter where you are, you can find it."
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Another Victim of Technology: Braille Literacy
from http://www.findingdulcinea.com/news/education/2010/feb/Another-Victim-of-Technology--Braille-Literacy.html
February 10, 2010 08:00 AM
by Colleen Brondou
Although technology has been a blessing for those with visual impairments, the abundance of audio and digital technology has made reading Braille a rare skill.
Is Braille Becoming Obsolete?
According to a report issued in 2008 by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), less than 10 percent of the 1.3 million people who are legally blind in the United States can read Braille. Due to technology, Braille is more available than ever, Bill Glauber reports for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. But more audio is also available, along with digital technology or computer software applications that translate the written word into speech.
The NFB believes there are three reasons for the decline: a shortage of Braille teachers, teachers that haven’t received enough training in Braille and a belief among educators that Braille instruction isn’t necessary.
Read How You Want helps those with reading disabilities, vision impairment and normal vision find the perfect book format. In addition to creating large print and Braille versions of text, Read How You Want has ebooks and audiobooks, and has developed special formats for people with reading disabilities and phonetic formats for English learners.
Background: The decline of Braille
Marc Riccobono, executive director of the National Federation of the Blind’s Jernigan Institute in Baltimore, was diagnosed with glaucoma at the age of 5. During the 1960s and 1970s, he explained to Glauber, many blind students were placed in the public education system. There weren’t enough Braille teachers to handle the influx, so audio devices became a popular way to teach students with visual impairments.
“You had a whole generation that grew up without Braille,” Riccobono told Glauber.
Around the middle of the 20th century, approximately half of visually impaired school children in the U.S. read Braille. Now, Glauber reports, that number is around 1 in 10.
Opinion: “Braille is literacy”
Though text-to-speech technology has its place, Braille advocates point out that being able to read Braille equates to academic success.
“People realize that Braille is literacy,” Hope Good, who works in program support at Engleburg Elementary, told Glauber. “You can’t spell or punctuate with a tape recorder.”
Citing statistics from the NFB, the Wausau Daily Herald points out that only 30 percent of blind adults are employed, and of those, more than 80 percent work in careers that require the use of Braille every day.
“Braille is attached to literacy and to success in employment,” Cheryl Orgas, executive director of Audio & Braille Literacy Enhancement Inc., told the Journal Sentinel.
Key Player: Louis Braille
Jan. 4, 2009, was the 200-year anniversary of the birth of Louis Braille, the man who invented the Braille system of reading. Blind as the result of an accident at the age of 3, Louis created his invention based on a French military code called “night writing.” The code was a series of raised dots that allowed soldiers to communicate top-secret information on the battlefield in silence. Louis modified the system when he was only 15 years old and published the first book in Braille in 1829.
Reference: National Federation of the Blind
National Federation of the Blind has launched a Braille literacy campaign to make sure that everyone with visual impairments has the opportunity to learn Braille. Visit the site to read the NFB’s report, “The Braille Literacy Crisis in America,” and learn how to promote Braille literacy.
February 10, 2010 08:00 AM
by Colleen Brondou
Although technology has been a blessing for those with visual impairments, the abundance of audio and digital technology has made reading Braille a rare skill.
Is Braille Becoming Obsolete?
According to a report issued in 2008 by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), less than 10 percent of the 1.3 million people who are legally blind in the United States can read Braille. Due to technology, Braille is more available than ever, Bill Glauber reports for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. But more audio is also available, along with digital technology or computer software applications that translate the written word into speech.
The NFB believes there are three reasons for the decline: a shortage of Braille teachers, teachers that haven’t received enough training in Braille and a belief among educators that Braille instruction isn’t necessary.
Read How You Want helps those with reading disabilities, vision impairment and normal vision find the perfect book format. In addition to creating large print and Braille versions of text, Read How You Want has ebooks and audiobooks, and has developed special formats for people with reading disabilities and phonetic formats for English learners.
Background: The decline of Braille
Marc Riccobono, executive director of the National Federation of the Blind’s Jernigan Institute in Baltimore, was diagnosed with glaucoma at the age of 5. During the 1960s and 1970s, he explained to Glauber, many blind students were placed in the public education system. There weren’t enough Braille teachers to handle the influx, so audio devices became a popular way to teach students with visual impairments.
“You had a whole generation that grew up without Braille,” Riccobono told Glauber.
Around the middle of the 20th century, approximately half of visually impaired school children in the U.S. read Braille. Now, Glauber reports, that number is around 1 in 10.
Opinion: “Braille is literacy”
Though text-to-speech technology has its place, Braille advocates point out that being able to read Braille equates to academic success.
“People realize that Braille is literacy,” Hope Good, who works in program support at Engleburg Elementary, told Glauber. “You can’t spell or punctuate with a tape recorder.”
Citing statistics from the NFB, the Wausau Daily Herald points out that only 30 percent of blind adults are employed, and of those, more than 80 percent work in careers that require the use of Braille every day.
“Braille is attached to literacy and to success in employment,” Cheryl Orgas, executive director of Audio & Braille Literacy Enhancement Inc., told the Journal Sentinel.
Key Player: Louis Braille
Jan. 4, 2009, was the 200-year anniversary of the birth of Louis Braille, the man who invented the Braille system of reading. Blind as the result of an accident at the age of 3, Louis created his invention based on a French military code called “night writing.” The code was a series of raised dots that allowed soldiers to communicate top-secret information on the battlefield in silence. Louis modified the system when he was only 15 years old and published the first book in Braille in 1829.
Reference: National Federation of the Blind
National Federation of the Blind has launched a Braille literacy campaign to make sure that everyone with visual impairments has the opportunity to learn Braille. Visit the site to read the NFB’s report, “The Braille Literacy Crisis in America,” and learn how to promote Braille literacy.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Easy Talking Online Mobile Apps: Acapela Group Provides Online Speech Synthesis Capability for Iphone, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian Platforms
From http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/easy-talking-online-mobile-apps-acapela-group-provides-online-speech-synthesis-capability-for-iphone-android-windows-mobile-and-symbian-platforms-83869302.html
To be Unveiled at the GSMA Mobile World Congress, Barcelona - Visit Acapela Booth to try out our Talking Demos, Live!
MONS, Belgium, February 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Acapela Group, expert and inventor of innovative vocal solutions, will be announcing the availability of its cloud computing service to mobile developers, for easy talking apps deployment to speech empower iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian platforms, at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Acapela aims to create a vocal world accessible to anyone, whatever the size of their project, and to promote and open the use of speech to all developers. As such the company fully supports the increasing demand for *online resources* and is enhancing its *cloud computing service* by providing cross-platform access which meets the demands of the mobile market.
iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile or Symbian developers will all benefit from Acapela's on-line service, to *easily add the ability to talk to their app*, temporarily use text to speech resources to vocalize interactive campaigns, mobile advertising, games or e-learning, or introduce speech capability for the first time. Acapela's online text to speech grants mobile developers full access to all its highest quality voices and languages, at a controlled and low cost, free from any footprint issues.
Acapela VaaS for Mobile is an invitation to all developers to easily *experience speech synthesis for the first time*. They then choose the voice interface best adapted to their project: connect the app online, use sound files or integrate the speech engine. Acapela offers the full range of speech options, to shape and meet all vocalization needs.
Acapela VaaS will be available for iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian Smart phones, in 25 languages and 50 voices.
Check out http://www.acapela-vaas.com and apply for your free test account.
Acapela VaaS for Mobile will be unveiled during the Mobile World Congress - further information will be available on the acapela-vaas website from Feb 15th.
*Hear more about Acapea VaaS and meet the Acapela Team during the GSMA Mobile World Congress expo in Barcelona, booth 2E59
http://www.mobileworldcongress.com/exhibition/whos_exhibiting.htm*
SOURCE Acapela Group
To be Unveiled at the GSMA Mobile World Congress, Barcelona - Visit Acapela Booth to try out our Talking Demos, Live!
MONS, Belgium, February 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Acapela Group, expert and inventor of innovative vocal solutions, will be announcing the availability of its cloud computing service to mobile developers, for easy talking apps deployment to speech empower iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian platforms, at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Acapela aims to create a vocal world accessible to anyone, whatever the size of their project, and to promote and open the use of speech to all developers. As such the company fully supports the increasing demand for *online resources* and is enhancing its *cloud computing service* by providing cross-platform access which meets the demands of the mobile market.
iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile or Symbian developers will all benefit from Acapela's on-line service, to *easily add the ability to talk to their app*, temporarily use text to speech resources to vocalize interactive campaigns, mobile advertising, games or e-learning, or introduce speech capability for the first time. Acapela's online text to speech grants mobile developers full access to all its highest quality voices and languages, at a controlled and low cost, free from any footprint issues.
Acapela VaaS for Mobile is an invitation to all developers to easily *experience speech synthesis for the first time*. They then choose the voice interface best adapted to their project: connect the app online, use sound files or integrate the speech engine. Acapela offers the full range of speech options, to shape and meet all vocalization needs.
Acapela VaaS will be available for iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and Symbian Smart phones, in 25 languages and 50 voices.
Check out http://www.acapela-vaas.com and apply for your free test account.
Acapela VaaS for Mobile will be unveiled during the Mobile World Congress - further information will be available on the acapela-vaas website from Feb 15th.
*Hear more about Acapea VaaS and meet the Acapela Team during the GSMA Mobile World Congress expo in Barcelona, booth 2E59
http://www.mobileworldcongress.com/exhibition/whos_exhibiting.htm*
SOURCE Acapela Group
Nuance Voice Control for Automotive Powers Speech for Leading QNX CAR Application Platform
From http://www.marketwatch.com/story/nuance-voice-control-for-automotive-powers-speech-for-leading-qnx-car-application-platform-2010-02-09?reflink=MW_news_stmp
Nuance's Innovative Speech Technology Tailored for the Connected Car Fully Integrated as Part of QNX CAR Application Platform
BURLINGTON, Mass. & OTTAWA, Feb 09, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Nuance Communications, (NUAN 14.48, -0.35, -2.36%) and QNX Software Systems, a Harman International (HAR 41.81, +0.62, +1.51%) and an industry leader in real-time, embedded OS technology, together announced that Nuance Voice Control for Automotive is powering the connected speech capabilities of the QNX(R) CAR application platform. Drivers will be able to speak text messages and emails, enter navigation commands, and access the Web for sports, news, traffic, and more, powered by Nuance's connected speech capabilities working seamlessly with the QNX CAR platform.
The QNX CAR application platform, which provides the software foundation for the LTE Connected Car from the Alcatel-Lucent ng Connect Program, offers a new approach to prototyping and productizing in-vehicle systems by pre-integrating QNX products and third-party technologies as a set of reference implementations. With Nuance, QNX Software Systems seamlessly integrates advanced speech recognition capabilities based on Nuance's trusted core Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech technology and advancements in natural language understanding to provide drivers the ability to find directions, music, and other Web-based information just by using their voice.
"To play in today's highly competitive market, automakers and their Tier One suppliers need to integrate a variety of connectivity and multimedia features while ensuring drivers keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road," said Sebastien Marineau-Mes, vice president of engineering, QNX. "By integrating intuitive speech technology from Nuance, the QNX CAR application platform can help drivers access a variety of connected services with simple voice commands. Voice enables highly intuitive user interfaces, ultimately driving adoption of connected car services and minimizing manual and visual distractions."
Nuance Voice Control Automotive leverages the same speech technology found in the successful Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search Apps for iPhone to provide a safer connected car experience that allows drivers to say a variety of spoken commands. In fact, it's the industry's first solution to provide one-button, seamless access to all services leveraging Nuance's advancements in natural language understanding and mobile speech applications.
"We've worked closely with QNX to ensure that the many automotive manufacturers and Tier One suppliers they serve can provide their customers with an amazing connected car experience powered by speech," said Arnd Weil, general manager, Nuance Automotive. "We continue to focus on making strides in flexible natural language understanding technology, as it not only provides our partners and customers with the ability to further differentiate in a competitive market, but also to ensure that the innovations shaping today's connected in-car experience aren't creating increased distractions behind the wheel."
Availability
The version of the QNX CAR application platform featuring Nuance Voice Control Automotive's innovative speech capabilities is scheduled for release to auto manufacturers and suppliers in April 2010.
QNX Software Systems brings industry-leading production experience and a 30-year track record of cutting-edge technology and innovative programs to Nuance Communications solutions. This combined with Nuance's automotive solutions, which power the speech recognition and text-to-speech capabilities of more than 25 million automobiles and 20 million personal navigation devices from the world's leading brands, creates a compelling integrated platform for today's leading auto manufacturers.
Nuance's Innovative Speech Technology Tailored for the Connected Car Fully Integrated as Part of QNX CAR Application Platform
BURLINGTON, Mass. & OTTAWA, Feb 09, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Nuance Communications, (NUAN 14.48, -0.35, -2.36%) and QNX Software Systems, a Harman International (HAR 41.81, +0.62, +1.51%) and an industry leader in real-time, embedded OS technology, together announced that Nuance Voice Control for Automotive is powering the connected speech capabilities of the QNX(R) CAR application platform. Drivers will be able to speak text messages and emails, enter navigation commands, and access the Web for sports, news, traffic, and more, powered by Nuance's connected speech capabilities working seamlessly with the QNX CAR platform.
The QNX CAR application platform, which provides the software foundation for the LTE Connected Car from the Alcatel-Lucent ng Connect Program, offers a new approach to prototyping and productizing in-vehicle systems by pre-integrating QNX products and third-party technologies as a set of reference implementations. With Nuance, QNX Software Systems seamlessly integrates advanced speech recognition capabilities based on Nuance's trusted core Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech technology and advancements in natural language understanding to provide drivers the ability to find directions, music, and other Web-based information just by using their voice.
"To play in today's highly competitive market, automakers and their Tier One suppliers need to integrate a variety of connectivity and multimedia features while ensuring drivers keep their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road," said Sebastien Marineau-Mes, vice president of engineering, QNX. "By integrating intuitive speech technology from Nuance, the QNX CAR application platform can help drivers access a variety of connected services with simple voice commands. Voice enables highly intuitive user interfaces, ultimately driving adoption of connected car services and minimizing manual and visual distractions."
Nuance Voice Control Automotive leverages the same speech technology found in the successful Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search Apps for iPhone to provide a safer connected car experience that allows drivers to say a variety of spoken commands. In fact, it's the industry's first solution to provide one-button, seamless access to all services leveraging Nuance's advancements in natural language understanding and mobile speech applications.
"We've worked closely with QNX to ensure that the many automotive manufacturers and Tier One suppliers they serve can provide their customers with an amazing connected car experience powered by speech," said Arnd Weil, general manager, Nuance Automotive. "We continue to focus on making strides in flexible natural language understanding technology, as it not only provides our partners and customers with the ability to further differentiate in a competitive market, but also to ensure that the innovations shaping today's connected in-car experience aren't creating increased distractions behind the wheel."
Availability
The version of the QNX CAR application platform featuring Nuance Voice Control Automotive's innovative speech capabilities is scheduled for release to auto manufacturers and suppliers in April 2010.
QNX Software Systems brings industry-leading production experience and a 30-year track record of cutting-edge technology and innovative programs to Nuance Communications solutions. This combined with Nuance's automotive solutions, which power the speech recognition and text-to-speech capabilities of more than 25 million automobiles and 20 million personal navigation devices from the world's leading brands, creates a compelling integrated platform for today's leading auto manufacturers.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Samsung Electronics Unveils Its New eBook Reader with WiFi Connectivity
From http://www.koreaittimes.com/node/7239
In the midst of growing interest in eBooks, fueled largely by the launch of Apple's iPad (a tablet PC with a built-in eBook reader), Samsung Electronics is about to launch its new WiFi eBook reader, creating a buzz in the market. On February 2, Samsung Electronics announced that it would launch its new 6-inch eBook reader (model: SNE-60/60K), with WiFi connectivity. SNE-60/60K, Samsung Electronics' second eBook reader, features WiFi connectivity that the first one did not have. Since WiFi connectivity is considered as a must in the promotion of eBooks, the world's largest electronics maker is set to vigorously market its WiFi enabled SNE-60/60K in both online and offline stores in order to take on the eBook reader market.
The newly released WiFi eBook reader is designed to allow users to download eBooks at 50-60 percent of general print book prices in chain bookstores - such as Kyobo Mungo, the largest and most famous book store in South Korea. On top of that, Samsung Electronics has already forged partnerships with major Korean newspapers to enable their subscribers to automatically download and clip news articles of their choice through its eBook reader SNE-60/60K.
Samsung Electronics' new eBook reader comes with 2GB internal memory, which is about 1400 books or more than 24,000 notes. The new eBook reader, with an e-paper display similar to real paper, adopts chic slide-up design so as to make reading and writing more convenient. When the front slide of the new eBook reader is rolled up, users can read books and use other functions without using the built-in stylus; when it is rolled down, the stylus will give users access to all of the functions. Free and open eBook standard ePub, PDF, and TXT are all supported to provide an effective reading environment. In addition, when users come across a word they do not understand, they can click on them with the built-in stylus and look them up immediately in on-board Korean-English and English-Korean dictionaries. Furthermore, Samsung Electronics' new eBook reader, equipped with a TTS (Text-to-Speech) engine, can read audio books aloud with accurate pronunciation, thereby allowing users to listen to audio books through their earphones on the bus or subway. The new eBook reader also features a built-in MP3 player. In addition, thank to the paper-like protection sheet on the screen, users can feel as if they write something with a normal pen on real paper. With the built-in stylus, users are able to make annotations in their reading sections, news articles, and images. Also, they can insert notes onto their reading sections and news articles. In a strategic partnership with Kyobo Mungo, Samsung Electronics came up with its second eBook reader - which is scheduled to sell online and offline bookstores of Kyobo Mungo, starting on February 8.
In the midst of growing interest in eBooks, fueled largely by the launch of Apple's iPad (a tablet PC with a built-in eBook reader), Samsung Electronics is about to launch its new WiFi eBook reader, creating a buzz in the market. On February 2, Samsung Electronics announced that it would launch its new 6-inch eBook reader (model: SNE-60/60K), with WiFi connectivity. SNE-60/60K, Samsung Electronics' second eBook reader, features WiFi connectivity that the first one did not have. Since WiFi connectivity is considered as a must in the promotion of eBooks, the world's largest electronics maker is set to vigorously market its WiFi enabled SNE-60/60K in both online and offline stores in order to take on the eBook reader market.
The newly released WiFi eBook reader is designed to allow users to download eBooks at 50-60 percent of general print book prices in chain bookstores - such as Kyobo Mungo, the largest and most famous book store in South Korea. On top of that, Samsung Electronics has already forged partnerships with major Korean newspapers to enable their subscribers to automatically download and clip news articles of their choice through its eBook reader SNE-60/60K.
Samsung Electronics' new eBook reader comes with 2GB internal memory, which is about 1400 books or more than 24,000 notes. The new eBook reader, with an e-paper display similar to real paper, adopts chic slide-up design so as to make reading and writing more convenient. When the front slide of the new eBook reader is rolled up, users can read books and use other functions without using the built-in stylus; when it is rolled down, the stylus will give users access to all of the functions. Free and open eBook standard ePub, PDF, and TXT are all supported to provide an effective reading environment. In addition, when users come across a word they do not understand, they can click on them with the built-in stylus and look them up immediately in on-board Korean-English and English-Korean dictionaries. Furthermore, Samsung Electronics' new eBook reader, equipped with a TTS (Text-to-Speech) engine, can read audio books aloud with accurate pronunciation, thereby allowing users to listen to audio books through their earphones on the bus or subway. The new eBook reader also features a built-in MP3 player. In addition, thank to the paper-like protection sheet on the screen, users can feel as if they write something with a normal pen on real paper. With the built-in stylus, users are able to make annotations in their reading sections, news articles, and images. Also, they can insert notes onto their reading sections and news articles. In a strategic partnership with Kyobo Mungo, Samsung Electronics came up with its second eBook reader - which is scheduled to sell online and offline bookstores of Kyobo Mungo, starting on February 8.
Google to Break the Language Barrier With Android Translator
From http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-to-break-the-language-barrier/17385/
Google has (possibly) done it again! Word on the street says that Google engineers are working on a translator for the Android smart phone that will translate one language to another- almost completely in real time. Now, there’s a few problems in the past that have appeared when trying to do anything involving voice translation. First off, the pronunciation problem. Everybody has different ways of saying things and often times it doesn’t translate correctly.
Ever use those voice to text translators? If you say “the fish is in the lake bed” it translates it to text and says something like, “the dish is in the cake head”. What?! The other problem is that the dictionaries are so limited that often times it can’t even keep up with the human language. Throw slang and a foreign language into this and it spells trouble.
I used Babel Fish one time to translate a Japanese message that was saying “I’ll call you tomorrow” and the translation came out to say “tomorrow I will use the telephone on you!!” Something innocent turns into somewhat of a threat when a literal word by word conversion is used without artificial intelligence.
Google has come up with a few solutions to these pesky problems for its up coming Android translator. It will be crawling through various web pages and documents in different languages so that it can get an artificial grasp on the human language. The translator will also be able to view the words as part of a whole; fully understanding the complete sentence rather than each word separately.
This tool is expected to support a 52-language text translation, along with voice recognition and text to speech capabilities.
Communication is a vital part of everything we do. We need it for everything, including sitting down with the CEO of a Japanese company via video conference with your corporation. While the internet allows communication overseas and makes business easier, the language barrier that accompanies this freedom often stands in the way. If all goes well, this tool could be utilized by individuals and businesses to bridge the gap in culture and language.
Google has (possibly) done it again! Word on the street says that Google engineers are working on a translator for the Android smart phone that will translate one language to another- almost completely in real time. Now, there’s a few problems in the past that have appeared when trying to do anything involving voice translation. First off, the pronunciation problem. Everybody has different ways of saying things and often times it doesn’t translate correctly.
Ever use those voice to text translators? If you say “the fish is in the lake bed” it translates it to text and says something like, “the dish is in the cake head”. What?! The other problem is that the dictionaries are so limited that often times it can’t even keep up with the human language. Throw slang and a foreign language into this and it spells trouble.
I used Babel Fish one time to translate a Japanese message that was saying “I’ll call you tomorrow” and the translation came out to say “tomorrow I will use the telephone on you!!” Something innocent turns into somewhat of a threat when a literal word by word conversion is used without artificial intelligence.
Google has come up with a few solutions to these pesky problems for its up coming Android translator. It will be crawling through various web pages and documents in different languages so that it can get an artificial grasp on the human language. The translator will also be able to view the words as part of a whole; fully understanding the complete sentence rather than each word separately.
This tool is expected to support a 52-language text translation, along with voice recognition and text to speech capabilities.
Communication is a vital part of everything we do. We need it for everything, including sitting down with the CEO of a Japanese company via video conference with your corporation. While the internet allows communication overseas and makes business easier, the language barrier that accompanies this freedom often stands in the way. If all goes well, this tool could be utilized by individuals and businesses to bridge the gap in culture and language.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Prompt # 4: People of all ages, abilities, and needs may be able to benefit from assistive technology.
From http://kleeuwe7.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/prompt-4-people-of-all-ages-abilities-and-needs-may-be-able-to-benefit-from-assistive-technology-everyones-needs-are-different-understanding-and-meeting-the-needs-of-the-individual-are-critic/
Prompt # 4: People of all ages, abilities, and needs may be able to benefit from assistive technology. Everyone’s needs are different. Understanding and meeting the needs of the individual are critical. There are many technology solutions available.
Technology has great potential in providing access for all learners. Through the use of a variety of assistive technologies, students with disabilities can have the ability to access the general curriculum. When assistive technology is appropriately integrated into the regular classroom, students are provided with multiple means to complete their work.
Technology helps students with disabilities on many different levels. It can help them accomplish tasks like:
Master grade-level content. Technology presents the material in different forms (visually, auditorily, etc.)
Improve writing and organizational skills. Technology can enable students with learning disabilities or autism to do such things as develop a concept map for a research paper and write using grade-level vocabulary words they wouldn’t use without a computer due to poor spelling skills.
“Read” grade-level text. The computer either reads the text digitally or presents it at a lower grade level for students with reading disabilities or visual impairments.
Take notes. Many students with disabilities have difficulty taking notes in longhand because of poor spelling, writing, and/or eye-hand coordination skills.
Master educational concepts that would have been beyond their reach. Students can experience abstract concepts such as the metamorphosis of a flower through 3-D simulations.
By making a student more independent, assistive technology allows teachers to spend more time on group activities and one-to-one with students. Assistive technology can provide a teacher more options in addressing different learning styles for individual students, using visual, auditory and tactile approaches. A student who is more fully integrated into the classroom is less of a distraction to other students. A student who is fully included into the classroom can interact with and help other students, facilitating a more positive classroom atmosphere. Being in a classroom with a special needs student who is fully included and using assistive technology effectively is an educational experience in itself, for other students.
When reviewing the Americans with Disabilities Act I have found examples of assistive technology that helps individuals with everyday tasks that many without disabilities fail to recognize:
Toilets and showers equipped with grab bars for persons who may fall easily or require supports
A computer that can be programmed to talk for individuals who cannot speak
Wheelchairs, both manual and power, for individuals who cannot walk due to paralysis or weakness in their legs
Hearing aids and other amplification devices for individuals with hearing loss
Large screen computers for individuals with visual problems
Devices that operate lamps, radios and other appliances through a remote control switching device, that might be attached to a person’s wheelchair
These are just some examples, and I am sure that many people think that assistive technology only refers to those educational devices for learning. Assistive technology also includes devices that help those with disabilities to function in society, their own lives, and ensure independence. As I have been walking around my school and public places I find myself more aware of the entrances, bathrooms, counters, and tables for those that have disabilities. Can an individual with disabilities access these areas independently? This is a question that I have asked myself quite frequently since our last class. I find that many places are not under compliance. There have been doors in public places that are difficult for me to open independently, and I could only imagine the stress and frustration for someone that cannot physically complete these everyday tasks independently. Looking at my school and my classroom I have found that an individual with disabilities cannot attend. There are not elevators to each floor, they cannot access the lunch room, they cannot get to my classroom, there are no ramps, and there is no access to special subject classrooms.
Prompt # 4: People of all ages, abilities, and needs may be able to benefit from assistive technology. Everyone’s needs are different. Understanding and meeting the needs of the individual are critical. There are many technology solutions available.
Technology has great potential in providing access for all learners. Through the use of a variety of assistive technologies, students with disabilities can have the ability to access the general curriculum. When assistive technology is appropriately integrated into the regular classroom, students are provided with multiple means to complete their work.
Technology helps students with disabilities on many different levels. It can help them accomplish tasks like:
Master grade-level content. Technology presents the material in different forms (visually, auditorily, etc.)
Improve writing and organizational skills. Technology can enable students with learning disabilities or autism to do such things as develop a concept map for a research paper and write using grade-level vocabulary words they wouldn’t use without a computer due to poor spelling skills.
“Read” grade-level text. The computer either reads the text digitally or presents it at a lower grade level for students with reading disabilities or visual impairments.
Take notes. Many students with disabilities have difficulty taking notes in longhand because of poor spelling, writing, and/or eye-hand coordination skills.
Master educational concepts that would have been beyond their reach. Students can experience abstract concepts such as the metamorphosis of a flower through 3-D simulations.
By making a student more independent, assistive technology allows teachers to spend more time on group activities and one-to-one with students. Assistive technology can provide a teacher more options in addressing different learning styles for individual students, using visual, auditory and tactile approaches. A student who is more fully integrated into the classroom is less of a distraction to other students. A student who is fully included into the classroom can interact with and help other students, facilitating a more positive classroom atmosphere. Being in a classroom with a special needs student who is fully included and using assistive technology effectively is an educational experience in itself, for other students.
When reviewing the Americans with Disabilities Act I have found examples of assistive technology that helps individuals with everyday tasks that many without disabilities fail to recognize:
Toilets and showers equipped with grab bars for persons who may fall easily or require supports
A computer that can be programmed to talk for individuals who cannot speak
Wheelchairs, both manual and power, for individuals who cannot walk due to paralysis or weakness in their legs
Hearing aids and other amplification devices for individuals with hearing loss
Large screen computers for individuals with visual problems
Devices that operate lamps, radios and other appliances through a remote control switching device, that might be attached to a person’s wheelchair
These are just some examples, and I am sure that many people think that assistive technology only refers to those educational devices for learning. Assistive technology also includes devices that help those with disabilities to function in society, their own lives, and ensure independence. As I have been walking around my school and public places I find myself more aware of the entrances, bathrooms, counters, and tables for those that have disabilities. Can an individual with disabilities access these areas independently? This is a question that I have asked myself quite frequently since our last class. I find that many places are not under compliance. There have been doors in public places that are difficult for me to open independently, and I could only imagine the stress and frustration for someone that cannot physically complete these everyday tasks independently. Looking at my school and my classroom I have found that an individual with disabilities cannot attend. There are not elevators to each floor, they cannot access the lunch room, they cannot get to my classroom, there are no ramps, and there is no access to special subject classrooms.
7 Ways to help dyslexic children succeed
I've seen many comments that TextAloud really seems to help dyslexics with reading improvements.
From http://everydaypsychology.co.cc/?p=24934
By: Robert Langston
February 7, 2010
7 Ways to help dyslexic children succeed
1. Full discloser is the order of the day
It has been my experience that children want straight answers to what is happening with them and why. Educate yourself on dyslexia, and then share what you have learned with the child. If a child is left to his or her own devices to figure out what is wrong, the chances are what he or she comes up with will be worse than what is actually happening (i.e. ‘I’m just stupid’ or ‘my brain is broken’). Educate yourself and your child to demystify the situation.
2. Reinforce strengths
The average child spends a tremendous amount of time mastering how to read and write. If a child has learning challenges, this time can become associated with struggle and defeat. It is critical that you find alternative ways for this child to experience success. Be attentive and aware; seek out the child’s strengths and magnify them. Keep in mind that a child may look to you as a barometer of their overall worth. Remember that a child’s strength may not always be a traditional strength like sports. It may be more unique, such as Lego construction or being a good friend to others.
3. Reading is hard work– at least make it interesting
Dyslexic children might not like the reading process but they can really like the content. Finding passages that relate to the child’s interests can make the experience more enjoyable. For example: If a child has an affinity for All Terrain Vehicles (ATV’s) then take pages from ATV magazines and watch the motivation levels rise.
4. Provide current role models
Everyone has seen the black and white picture of Albert Einstein with his hair standing on end that has been associated with dyslexia. I feel it is harder for children today to draw self-confidence from someone who died in the 1950’s, even though he is a great role model. Give them modern-day dyslexic role models: Orlando Bloom, Jackie Chan, McDreamy himself, Patrick Dempsey, and don’t forget some ladies too: Selma Hayek, Jewel, Whoopi Goldberg. Keeping it current can keep it real for children.
5. Assistive technology
Buying a child with dyslexia a computer is not giving them assistive technology. Adding Dragon Naturally Speaking or Kurzweil 3000 and working with them until they master using the voice recognition software is a step in the right direction. Let’s face it. For dyslexics, the ability to have your computer read an email aloud and transcribe your response is an assistive technology home run. I’m not saying to stop trying to teach your child to read. A good balance of hard work and help can ensure better productivity in school and life.
6. Multi-sensory approach to learning at school or home
There are schools which I refer to in The Power of Dyslexic Thinking as ‘pockets of greatness.’ These are schools around the country that use a multi-sensory approach to teach children with learning challenges. If you cannot afford to send a child to schools such as Churchill Center & School in Missouri or Currey Ingram Academy in Tennessee then maybe you can find local tutors trained in the same methods that these schools use. Some of these methods include the Orton-Gillingham, Slingerland Approach or Wilson Reading System. Look online for local tutor-locating search engines.
7. Provide accommodations
Early intervention provides the greatest chance of success in reading fluency. Remember that preserving a child’s self esteem intact is the most important factor in his or her surviving and thriving in the classroom and life. For this, I offer the accommodation list I used myself: Oral test-taking, classroom note-takers, people reading written assignments onto a recorder, audio books and un-timed test-taking. Focus on what it will take for a child to learn in his or her class tomorrow and you both will live to read another day.
From http://everydaypsychology.co.cc/?p=24934
By: Robert Langston
February 7, 2010
7 Ways to help dyslexic children succeed
1. Full discloser is the order of the day
It has been my experience that children want straight answers to what is happening with them and why. Educate yourself on dyslexia, and then share what you have learned with the child. If a child is left to his or her own devices to figure out what is wrong, the chances are what he or she comes up with will be worse than what is actually happening (i.e. ‘I’m just stupid’ or ‘my brain is broken’). Educate yourself and your child to demystify the situation.
2. Reinforce strengths
The average child spends a tremendous amount of time mastering how to read and write. If a child has learning challenges, this time can become associated with struggle and defeat. It is critical that you find alternative ways for this child to experience success. Be attentive and aware; seek out the child’s strengths and magnify them. Keep in mind that a child may look to you as a barometer of their overall worth. Remember that a child’s strength may not always be a traditional strength like sports. It may be more unique, such as Lego construction or being a good friend to others.
3. Reading is hard work– at least make it interesting
Dyslexic children might not like the reading process but they can really like the content. Finding passages that relate to the child’s interests can make the experience more enjoyable. For example: If a child has an affinity for All Terrain Vehicles (ATV’s) then take pages from ATV magazines and watch the motivation levels rise.
4. Provide current role models
Everyone has seen the black and white picture of Albert Einstein with his hair standing on end that has been associated with dyslexia. I feel it is harder for children today to draw self-confidence from someone who died in the 1950’s, even though he is a great role model. Give them modern-day dyslexic role models: Orlando Bloom, Jackie Chan, McDreamy himself, Patrick Dempsey, and don’t forget some ladies too: Selma Hayek, Jewel, Whoopi Goldberg. Keeping it current can keep it real for children.
5. Assistive technology
Buying a child with dyslexia a computer is not giving them assistive technology. Adding Dragon Naturally Speaking or Kurzweil 3000 and working with them until they master using the voice recognition software is a step in the right direction. Let’s face it. For dyslexics, the ability to have your computer read an email aloud and transcribe your response is an assistive technology home run. I’m not saying to stop trying to teach your child to read. A good balance of hard work and help can ensure better productivity in school and life.
6. Multi-sensory approach to learning at school or home
There are schools which I refer to in The Power of Dyslexic Thinking as ‘pockets of greatness.’ These are schools around the country that use a multi-sensory approach to teach children with learning challenges. If you cannot afford to send a child to schools such as Churchill Center & School in Missouri or Currey Ingram Academy in Tennessee then maybe you can find local tutors trained in the same methods that these schools use. Some of these methods include the Orton-Gillingham, Slingerland Approach or Wilson Reading System. Look online for local tutor-locating search engines.
7. Provide accommodations
Early intervention provides the greatest chance of success in reading fluency. Remember that preserving a child’s self esteem intact is the most important factor in his or her surviving and thriving in the classroom and life. For this, I offer the accommodation list I used myself: Oral test-taking, classroom note-takers, people reading written assignments onto a recorder, audio books and un-timed test-taking. Focus on what it will take for a child to learn in his or her class tomorrow and you both will live to read another day.
Friday, February 5, 2010
New Uses for Text to Speech: Acapela Group Changes the Image of Voice
From http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-uses-for-text-to-speech-acapela-group-changes-the-image-of-voice-82774792.html
MONS, Belgium, January 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Acapela Group, expert and inventor of innovative vocal solutions, is creating a vocal world accessible to anyone, whatever the size of their project, in all fields, and positions itself as a key partner, giving its customers a powerful voice, helping them successfully take the floor.
Acapela is continuously reinforcing its strong commitment to the market while introducing numerous innovations to promote the use of text to speech for offline and online solutions, aimed at both professional developers and a wider public.
Owner of its technology, offering bespoke solutions, chosen by over a thousand customers and adopted by millions of users throughout the world, Acapela has considerably evolved since its creation in 2004. Acapela has harnessed its know how as a technology provider to become a Voice expert, ideally placed to answer all vocalization needs, at all levels.
New vocal developments
With over 50 million talking e-cards sent around the world since its creation in November 2008, the success of acapela.tv - Acapela's online sparkling laboratory- confirms the enormous interest of a non-specialist audience. Acapela VaaS, the online voice generation cloud computing service, Acapela TTS for iPhone, in the highly creative appstore world, Acapela Kiosk, which allows the easy vocalization of newspapers or the upcoming Acapela Box, for online and on demand voice file production, are the latest developments demonstrating Acapela's determination to provide efficient and simple solutions, across a wide range of environments and uses.
'Acapela is dedicated to improving the quality of voice synthesis through R&D and creates new opportunities for its use, inventing new vocal solutions and business models to provide highly natural voices to all users' says Lars-Erik Larsson, Acapela Group CEO.
New uses are being introduced offering solutions which open the vocal universe to a wider public. To help guide everyone, Acapela has grouped its products and services into four main families, featured on the new corporate website (http://www.acapela-group.com):
- Integration and development of text to speech engines, which remains its core activity, - Production of sound files, to allow easy generation of files from any computer, without the need for any technical knowledge, - Accessibility solutions to answer specific user groups needs, for whom text to speech is essential to gain in autonomy and access information, - Tailor-made voice creation, to meet a growing trend for the use of personalized voices in corporate marketing activities, helping create a company or brand audio strategy.
The growing speed with which companies are adopting 'tailored-made' voices thanks to 'Acapela Voice Factory' is another strong market signal validating Acapela expertise and capacity to help its customers with their audio marketing strategy. Developed on behalf of prestigious customers such as Accor or Banverket (Swedish railways), exclusive voices created by Acapela shape the customer's charter and enrich its image with a full vocal dimension. The Voice becomes one of the company's spokespeople, delivering and promoting a consistent and identifiable voice to distinguish the application or service.
25 languages and 50 voices are already available in the Acapela repertory. New ones are under development. Acapela vocalizes many services and applications throughout the world and is at present particularly talkative in e-ducation, books, mobile internet and cloud computing to keep facilitating content access for all. R&D teams are actively working on new and upcoming innovations, to create and produce more emotions, reflect all accents and come ever closer to the natural voice.
MONS, Belgium, January 27 /PRNewswire/ -- Acapela Group, expert and inventor of innovative vocal solutions, is creating a vocal world accessible to anyone, whatever the size of their project, in all fields, and positions itself as a key partner, giving its customers a powerful voice, helping them successfully take the floor.
Acapela is continuously reinforcing its strong commitment to the market while introducing numerous innovations to promote the use of text to speech for offline and online solutions, aimed at both professional developers and a wider public.
Owner of its technology, offering bespoke solutions, chosen by over a thousand customers and adopted by millions of users throughout the world, Acapela has considerably evolved since its creation in 2004. Acapela has harnessed its know how as a technology provider to become a Voice expert, ideally placed to answer all vocalization needs, at all levels.
New vocal developments
With over 50 million talking e-cards sent around the world since its creation in November 2008, the success of acapela.tv - Acapela's online sparkling laboratory- confirms the enormous interest of a non-specialist audience. Acapela VaaS, the online voice generation cloud computing service, Acapela TTS for iPhone, in the highly creative appstore world, Acapela Kiosk, which allows the easy vocalization of newspapers or the upcoming Acapela Box, for online and on demand voice file production, are the latest developments demonstrating Acapela's determination to provide efficient and simple solutions, across a wide range of environments and uses.
'Acapela is dedicated to improving the quality of voice synthesis through R&D and creates new opportunities for its use, inventing new vocal solutions and business models to provide highly natural voices to all users' says Lars-Erik Larsson, Acapela Group CEO.
New uses are being introduced offering solutions which open the vocal universe to a wider public. To help guide everyone, Acapela has grouped its products and services into four main families, featured on the new corporate website (http://www.acapela-group.com):
- Integration and development of text to speech engines, which remains its core activity, - Production of sound files, to allow easy generation of files from any computer, without the need for any technical knowledge, - Accessibility solutions to answer specific user groups needs, for whom text to speech is essential to gain in autonomy and access information, - Tailor-made voice creation, to meet a growing trend for the use of personalized voices in corporate marketing activities, helping create a company or brand audio strategy.
The growing speed with which companies are adopting 'tailored-made' voices thanks to 'Acapela Voice Factory' is another strong market signal validating Acapela expertise and capacity to help its customers with their audio marketing strategy. Developed on behalf of prestigious customers such as Accor or Banverket (Swedish railways), exclusive voices created by Acapela shape the customer's charter and enrich its image with a full vocal dimension. The Voice becomes one of the company's spokespeople, delivering and promoting a consistent and identifiable voice to distinguish the application or service.
25 languages and 50 voices are already available in the Acapela repertory. New ones are under development. Acapela vocalizes many services and applications throughout the world and is at present particularly talkative in e-ducation, books, mobile internet and cloud computing to keep facilitating content access for all. R&D teams are actively working on new and upcoming innovations, to create and produce more emotions, reflect all accents and come ever closer to the natural voice.
Google Nexus One's text to speech function censors swearing
From http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2010/01/25/google-nexus-one%E2%80%99s-text-to-speech-function-censors-swearing/
Published January 25, 2010 12:00 pm by Mic Wright
Google’s Nexus One features built-in voice recognition but don’t expect it to join in with your Malcom Tucker-esque foul-mouthed ranting. It seems Google’s voice tech takes a hard-line on swear words, censoring them outright…
Reuters discovered that the Google Nexus One’s voice-to-text transcription feature replaces ‘offensive’ words with strings of # symbols. The censorship seems to apply to all the most common four letter words.
Google says its not about censorship but more to do with protecting Google Nexus One users from unintended profanity. It claims that replacing potentially offensive words with # symbols means that if the phone get confused by your speech, it won’t accidentally offer up swear words.
Google’s spokesperson said: “We filter potentially offensive or inappropriate results because we went to avoid situations whereby we might misrecognize a spoken query and return a profanity when, in fact, the user said something completely innocent…our goal is to return results that show exactly what you said and we’re constantly working to improve the technology to better fit our users’ needs.”
Published January 25, 2010 12:00 pm by Mic Wright
Google’s Nexus One features built-in voice recognition but don’t expect it to join in with your Malcom Tucker-esque foul-mouthed ranting. It seems Google’s voice tech takes a hard-line on swear words, censoring them outright…
Reuters discovered that the Google Nexus One’s voice-to-text transcription feature replaces ‘offensive’ words with strings of # symbols. The censorship seems to apply to all the most common four letter words.
Google says its not about censorship but more to do with protecting Google Nexus One users from unintended profanity. It claims that replacing potentially offensive words with # symbols means that if the phone get confused by your speech, it won’t accidentally offer up swear words.
Google’s spokesperson said: “We filter potentially offensive or inappropriate results because we went to avoid situations whereby we might misrecognize a spoken query and return a profanity when, in fact, the user said something completely innocent…our goal is to return results that show exactly what you said and we’re constantly working to improve the technology to better fit our users’ needs.”
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Nuance Voice Control Automotive Brings the Power of Dragon to the Car
From
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20100201006108&newsLang=en
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20100201006108&newsLang=en
Auto Industry’s First Integrated Speech Interface for On- and Off-Board Services Powers the Connected Car, Leveraging Renowned Dragon Speech Capabilities
BURLINGTON, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN) today announced the availability of Nuance Voice Control Automotive, an innovative mobile platform that enables drivers to take advantage of today’s most popular connected services with simple, easy voice commands based on the popular Dragon NaturallySpeaking core speech technology. Nuance Voice Control Automotive is the industry’s first solution to provide one-button, seamless access to all services —on-board and connected — via a single, consistent voice user interface that leverages advancements in natural language understanding and mobile speech applications.
“Internet in the Car: The Future of In-Vehicle Connectivity”
Nuance Voice Control Automotive provides drivers around the world with a safer connected car experience through interaction with online services using remote speech applications based on Nuance’s robust Dragon core speech technology. Dragon is already used and trusted by millions globally via its PC-based dictation software, and the popular Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search Apps for iPhone. Now manufacturers can harness the power of Dragon in their cars to allow drivers to access dynamic real-time information and services including:
- SMS text messaging and email capabilities, allowing drivers to simply speak and send messages while keeping their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road;
- Interaction with social networks such as Twitter and Facebook;
- News, weather and traffic updates and the latest sports scores and stock prices;
- Movie theatre locations, film listings and times;
- Dining options in current area or point of destination; and,
- Price comparisons for hotels, fuel, etc.
According to a recent 2009 iSuppli report entitled, “Internet in the Car: The Future of In-Vehicle Connectivity,” Egil Juliussen, PhD., Principal Analyst and Fellow, Automotive Business Unit states that “The communication-based applications that use the Internet are currently the most useful for car use. This is due to the user interface need for communication applications, which can be served by speech recognition and text-to-speech.” Juliussen’s report also notes that “Mobile search for internet content is emerging for mobile phones and will see strong growth in the car in the next five years. To minimize driver distraction, mobile search will need a speech [input/output] interface.”
The Nuance Voice Control Automotive in-vehicle head unit serves as “mission control,” tying together all solution components to enable high-performance speech interaction with all services available in a connected car environment. The embedded in-vehicle head unit leverages the Nuance VoCon 3200 speech recognition engine and Nuance Vocalizer text-to-speech (TTS) solution to enable direct speech interaction with on-board applications, while Dragon technology is used for connected capabilities. These proven solutions allow drivers to use speech for controlling in-vehicle systems, including mobile phones, entertainment systems, navigation devices, and more.
“Automakers around the world are deploying in-car connected services that give drivers access to traffic reports, local business search, weather reports, and even the ability to send and receive text and email messages. However, it’s critical that these experience-altering services are accessible to the driver without creating heightened distraction behind the wheel,” said Arnd Weil, General Manager, Nuance Automotive. “Our Nuance Voice Control Automotive platform enables manufacturers to voice-enable every aspect of the in-car infotainment system, providing drivers with the ability to take advantage of these amazing connected services while keeping their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel. It’s part of our larger mission to reduce dangerous driver distractions.”
Nuance’s 2008 In-Car Distraction Study implemented by the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany, revealed that voice commands help drivers keep their eyes on the road, reducing driver distraction by as much as 100 percent depending on the task.
Nuance’s automotive solutions power the speech recognition and text-to-speech capabilities of more than 25 million automobiles and 20 million personal navigation devices from the world’s leading brands – including the recently unveiled MyFord Touch direct connect technology powered by Ford SYNC. Nuance offers a complete, integrated suite of technologies and services enabling voice-activated dialing, destination entry for navigation systems, and control of in-car infotainment systems.
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