Recent advances and technology breakthroughs
One would have thought “everything that can be invented has been invented” or so said Charles H Duell Commissioner US patent office 1899.. Well let me tell you things are still changing as fast as ever.
I recently added “Face Recognition” to my Picasa photo software (Its one of those cool Google aps) and it came up with some remarkable results. I tagged Judi and it found several hundred picture of her which was impressive and it even found her mother and her sister and asked if this was her which I though remarkable so maybe there is a family resemblance which is not visible to the naked eye. Even more impressive it found one of her good friends and suggested this might be Judi as well. Now it might be the fact that they both wear sunglasses or that the friend is a frequent companion on our holidays. On the down side it also suggested the friend’s husband might also be called Judi which indicates the software is not perfect yet. A bit like that “Life of Brian” scene “My name is Brian and so is my wife’s”
Anyway I spent a few hours teaching it who was who and sending myself dizzy looking at the same faces in hundreds of different poses. It cannot recognize profiles just full faces but if you have a picture of a crowd it will ask for all of them so if you were one of the people at the Taj Mahal when we were there a couple of years back can you please get in touch as I need to update the records.
So that kept me quiet for a few hours and I began thinking of what else is new and this automatic conversion of text to voice and vice-versa is interesting. It used to be just kids who texted each other and at alarming rates with nonsense and clipped phrasing “cos u r G8 lol” and “thx”. Now of course with the increase in phone technology things like Blackberry’s are common so Adults can now join in the fun all be it in the guise of working. So official emails are now flowing back and forth with shorter and shorter responses, more like Twitter which only allows a hundred or so characters which keep the reading to a manageable measure. Emails can also be translated for you so some voice sounding mildly like Steven Hawkins will inform you that you latest project key milestone has hit the pan and gone pear shaped.
So what about text to voice conversion will it translate “cos u r G8, lol” correctly and will it include all the um’s and er’s and giggling (my first encounter with lol caused me some concern as I wrongly translated it as Love yOu Lots which coming from my boss was worrying). So will we speak into our chosen device and have it translated into text sent to someone and translated back into voice. Now forgive me for stating the obvious but maybe we could just phone people and talk direct ?? or maybe leave a voicemail which would convert it to a text and send it to you over your favorite medium.
Sometimes I think we are just inventing things to keep ourselves occupied. Do you think there are teams of people in bunkers somewhere inventing things for the sake of it or is there a purpose to all of this.
We used to be limited by the processing capability of the machines we had. The first computer I worked with managed a continuous synthetic soap making process mixing all the ingredients in 2 ton batches day in day out. Now the processing capacity of this huge operation was 64k which is less than is in the calculator now on my desk. We even flew in a programmer from the US to make it work. How times change and now they would do it from their home probably still in their Pj’s.