Saturday, December 4, 2010

Google Acquires Phonetic Arts To Make Robo-Voices Sound Human

22 hours ago




No, Google hasn’t acquired Groupon (yet). But it does have a smaller, though very interesting acquisition to announce: it’s just acquired Phonetic Arts, a company based in the UK that works on speech synthesis in games.

Phonetic Arts makes technology that can convert lines of recorded dialog into a ‘speech library’ — feed it a few hundred lines of recordings using your voice, and it can then piece together those sounds to generate new sentences that sound surprisingly realistic. Up until now Phonetic Arts has primarily been focused on using this technology for games, but Google intends to use it more broadly to make its own automated voices sound more fluid and human.

In case you haven’t noticed, Google has been paying a huge amount of attention to its voice recognition and transcription technologies over the last few years (they’ve been researching it much longer, but now the tech is making it into products). YouTube now includes automatic voice transcription captions for millions of videos; Android has voice recognition integrated throughout the OS; and Google has voice search apps for other mobile platforms, like the iPhone.

But while these voice recognition apps are getting much better, whenever they need to read something back to you (for example, for language translation or GPS navigation) it’s quite obvious that you’re listening to a computer. Which is where Google is planning to start applying Phonetic Arts’ technology.

Also worth pointing out: in its official blog post, Google specifically talks about the growing tech scene in London:

There’s a particular focus right now in the U.K. on technology and innovation, and we’re delighted to be deepening our investment in the country with this acquisition. We already have a strong engineering center in London and look forward to welcoming Phonetic Arts to the team. We are excited about their technology, and while we don’t have plans to share yet, we’re confident that together we’ll move a little faster towards that Star Trek future.

An Easy Trick To Know Who Visited and Viewed Your Profile on Faceboon

Step 1: Copy the following script


Step 2: Open any Facebook page


Step 3: Paste the script in address bar as shown below


Wednesday, November 24, 2010

http://www.dailytut.com/blogging/blogger-mobile-blogging-easy.html

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

The CON folder mystery in Microsoft Windows !!!


For those who don't know what it is, here it is :
Create a new folder in ur system name it CON (caps or small)....It doesn't create..isn't it ???
The reason is because keywords cannot be named as file names .... And CON is a keyword in DOS.

And now the screenshot shows my desktop where I've created the CON folder. (It's the whole desktop to prove there are no error messages popping up and the time at the right bottom has my name on it (copyrighted :P)

The (dirty) secret is that I've renamed it with a space which is done using the invisible folder trick (previous post)


Just rename it as CON and with the alt button down press 0160 on ur numpad !!! As cool as that !!!

Qwiki, the Interactive Informant


Tuesday, November 16, 2010 0 comments



The new “information experience” !


Basically a short story about your search term, it narrates the script and also displays the best shots regarding the term.


Again requires invite ! This fact about invite has sure become an obstacle to people like freelance testers from home. But managed to get it by now and being an alpha user sharing the experience.


Would be easier in points, let's go:


1. Search for a term and the suggestions drop down, which is almost apt, and I seem to find more. I did a search for Tamil Nadu and I also got my hometown below it. Is it the IP? It knows a million things, but sure knows my hometown ;)





2. Topics related to your keyword are displayed in the form of maps, movies, images, animations and much more to come ! Since this is only the alpha version.





3. While the movie is playing you can also look for the "Q" symbol on the picture or video demonstrated and get to know related information on it. One can also click on the 'link'ed word on the script to search for it.


4. And after the movie, which can be paused or muted, there are a lot of other resources mentioned that can be used. Also one can replay or share what he/she has just seen/heard.





5. One drawback for rapid searchers would be the time factor where if it were text, just a ctrl+f would find the term we searched for, but here it would be waiting for the piece of information to flow in the form of A/V.
Otherwise it is too good to know information at ease, the female voice is another good choice. Good if they had a male voice too, might be an option just to add on.


P.S : It is also rumored/feared/hoped that Microsoft may approach Qwiki for an offer

Some useful softwares


Monday, November 8, 2010 0 comments

Boomerang for Gmail:


This is a plugin for Gmail to schedule the sending and receiving your mail. For more details visit: http://www.baydin.com/boomerang4gmail/


Email Oracle:


Add this to Gmail to track your Emails when the receiver opens your mails from his/her inbox. For more details visit: https://emailoracle.com/


Spiffy:


This is an application to manage upto 5 Gmail accounts. For more details visit: http://members.multiweb.nl/kevin/spiffy/


Mini Lyrics:


This is a plugin to display the lyrics in different personalized forms. It is too good to see the lyrics with transparent background floating at a part of your screen. For more details visit: http://www.crintsoft.com/


Recuva:


A software to recover the 'shift+deleted' files on your computer. Details here: http://www.piriform.com/recuva


Xnview:


An application to edit pictures and a folders bar to quickly browse through the pictures in your computer. Download form here: http://www.xnview.com/

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Cloudo its All About virtulaization,cloud Computing..Going Green





Cloudo is a hosted service running in a browser. The service is running on a server-side configuration commonly referred as LAMP-server (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).
The basic idea behind the technical architecture of this service is to provide the browser with intelligent components, so that potential server requests are kept to an optimized minimum. This is achieved utilizing XML, XSLT and Javascript files, which contain interface and behavioral related guidelines as well as a protocol for the communication layer.

The communication between the server and client is obtained with AJAX and the data is stored in XML. XSL is used to transform the data to HTML, rendering the actual user interface. Javascript is responsible to handle event related tasks, among other tasks.

The advantage with this approach is that the components can be modified, exchanged and new ones added without affecting each other, resulting in a versatile experience and interface which is driven by user preferences. For instance; the language is stored in XML-format so new languages can be added without the need for modifications of any other components. By utilizing these interchangeable components the system achieves the flexibility, extensibility and scalability which can support a high level of performance and a wide variety of web applications.

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Bomb Sabedo-New Computer Worm

Orkut is severely hit with a ‘Bom Sobado’ virus (Bom Sabado! means
Good Saturday in Portuguese!) and if you are receiving any messsage from
your Orkut friend (containing the word ‘Bom Sobado’), do not visit the
person’s profile.

The script once activated on your profile will automatically update
your status message as well as send message to all your contacts. And if
you are hit by the spam, change your Google account password right away



Technology Used By BombSabedo.

XSSWorm


Solution
* Delete Temp Folder form windows home directory
* Do not visit any profile on Orkut till this script is blocked ( Do
* not use Orkut till this is blocked, as you can get affected by Flash
scraps posted on your Scrap book too! )
* Clear your cookies and cache right away and change your password and security question.

''DO NOT ACCEPT A FRIEND REQUEST FROM
CHRISTOPHER DAVIES OR JESSICA DAVIES.
THEY ARE HACKERS....PLEASE TELL
EVERYONE ON YOUR LIST BECAUSE IF
SOMEONE ON YOUR LIST ADDS THEM THEY
WILL BE ON YOUR LIST TOO....HE WILL
FIGURE OUT YOUR COMPUTER IP AND
ADDRESS...SO PLEASE COPY AND PASTE THIS
MESSAGE TO EVERYONE, CAUSE IF
HE HACKS THEM , HE HACKS YOU

Friday, September 17, 2010

Virtual KeyBoard for CHROME

This is one cool keyboard I found on the net. An on-screen keyboard but one exclusive for Google Chrome browser. You can find it on this site and it has some cool features as the same as the on-screen keyboard and can be moved around the screen too.
But the enter and tab keys seem missing. And the num keys aren't present along with the win key which will not be of much use in a browser but yet is a disadvantage. And for ease of use alt and ctrl buttons are merged to give Alt+Ctrl in the plug-in. As said some basic ones in the on-screen keyboard are missing as the Pg up, down buttons, which doesn't add much of a disadvantage to it, only till the guy or girl is to entirely use only the mouse and chrome :P. You can install n try the plugin here : Virtual Keyboard. Supports many languages (when clicked on the tick mark on the keyboard). But they are still working on enhancing it. The "SITE" has much info too. USE


BUZZ It