| Jul. 18th, 2008 @ 09:05 pm Two bits of entertainment |
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Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog! Directed by the very-bored-during-the-writers-strike Joss Whedon, and free for downloading till midnight Sunday! Go watch, go watch!
And from the land of Librivox: Our founder got an email from a text-to-computer-voice service, essentially wanting Librivox to invest in their services. Hugh wrote the following response, which you can view in the Librivox forums here:
"Hi XYZ,
"Thanks for the note. For our text to speech needs, we have been using a sophisticated model of advanced humanoid biological computing systems (AHBCS) since project launch in 2005, and we are more than satisfied with the results to date. We've found the units to be occasionally idiosyncratic in their interpretation of texts, but we've come to view that as a positive rather than a negative. Many of our clients grew up listening to previous generations of AHBCS, whose idiosyncrasies were similar to the ones found in our current models, and our focus groups and marketing data suggests that these errors tend to provide a pleasing sense of nostalgia in our clients. One extensive study undertaken by our Psychological Evaluations Team found that listening to LibriVox recordings can actually trigger memory episodes of early interactions with various AHBCSs in the clients' childhoods (often these interactions were with the celebrated Parental Care Provision Units, about which much has been written, and many of which are still in service today ... in fact, we are using a good number of PCPUs in our fleet of AHBCSs ). Of course some listeners prefer more traditional text-to-speech technologies, which obviously deliver superior exactitude and consistency, at the expense of the more nebulous (and frankly, difficult to manage) qualities generated by our AHBCSs. However, we've found our niche, our listeners seem happy, and, if you can permit me such a flight of fancy, I dare say our AHBCSs show a certain twinkle in their visual perception indicators that I've not seen in units put to other, more traditional uses.
"Regarding speechifying our web site, in that area we could see some improvement. However, we currently operate on a budget of $0, and everything we do is done by volunteers (even the AHBCSs are volunteers!). If your company is interested in supporting a good cause, perhaps you could consider providing us with a freebie?
"Best regards,
etc." |
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amethyst73's journal
tired and somewhat headachey
tired
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