Computer! Start my blog!

Computer! Start my blog! was Originally Posted on June 17, 2005 by lavarock

I’m watching Star Trek and if you are familiar with the show, they control things by speaking to their computer.

“Computer, turn the lights on”, “Computer, how warm is it?”. They dictate their journals and the computer records the information. They could then ask for a written copy of the report (not that they use that much paper mind you).

Although this is shown on a science fiction program, it really is science FACT. Star Trek became a popular show because it was partially based on fact. Gene Roddenbury was well respected because he was able to present his fiction in a fact-based way that scientists were more than willing to supply facts and conjecture to make the program more realistic.

Unless you are knew the facts, you woudl watch the early series and say “Oh, yeah, they have a TV set and came up with a few sets, a bedroom, etc”. Yet there were complete plans drawn of the whole ship. Much thought went into the design of the ship, parts you never knew existed.

Here they had a TV show with a spaceship. The spaceship had blueprints of each level, including where the exercise rooms and transporters were located. Knowing crew members would be on long trips, the design included exercise rooms, hydrophonic gardens, electrical conduits, maintenance areas, crew quarters and guest quarters; all laid out as if the ship would be built any day now. Just by looking at the blueprints you could tell that this was a well thought out series. Imagine the TV show Friends. Now imagine that there were blueprints of every apartment in the building, names assigned to families in each apartment, accurate diagrams of the neighborhood, charts of times of trash pickup, etc.

So anyway, back to the computer. YOU can control the lights in your house by voice. It might cost you a hundred to two hundred dollars, but it is possible. A system called X-10 allows you to remotely control electronic equipment. You can turn up the heat, turn down the lights, close the drapes, all with a few pieces of equipment and some money. There also is a company who makes a voice recognition software interface so you really CAN say “Computer, close the curtains” and it happens! As I remember, it also has an interface that allows you to say “Computer, get IBM stock price” and it reads it back to you.

Speaking to your computer can be fun. I dictated some text into a microphone and software can convert your speech into a Word Document. After training, it can work quite well.

Other software allows you to type a sentence on your computer and receive a verbal representation of the text. You type “How are you today” and the computer speaks your words back to you. Here is a demo you can try now… http://www.research.att.com/projects/tts/demo.html

Years ago I wrote a Publishers Page for my computer users group newsletter. It described the early attempts at converting text to speech. I joked that soon you would have two computers speaking to each other across the room , telling knock-knock jokes. That is now possible!

Another neat computer trick is available on your scanner. I’ve used it for years but many other people have no idea it exists. You can convert a scan of a page of text into a Word or text document. Scanners generally work by taking a picture of a document and presenting it as a photo. Howevere, many scanners now come with OCR programs to perform Optical Character Recognition. The software looks at the photo and say “Oh, there is the letter “O” and creates a text “O” rather than a circular line. I used this capability to scan a list of zip codes from the phone book and make an editable text document out ot if.

Granted, sometimes the conversion is not great, but oftentimes getting massive amounts of text into a document and then editing it can be less work then typing the whole thing in by hand.

So, if you were following the ideas here and put them together, TODAY it is possible for me to take the sentence “Turn the computer off” from a piece of paper, scan it, convert it to text, take that text and have the computer speak it outload, then have another computer hear those words and turn the power off to my computer!

With that I leave you with the famous exit words of George Burns…

“Say Goodnight Gracie”!