First Look: Voice Rec Gets Better
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Dragon NaturallySpeaking 8 works well as a dictation tool, but its PC controls are still limited.
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I don't have an office, and I'm not running a conference, so I hope to hook up with someone, hopefully in the Bay Area, with either of these, to try some experimentation with FlickrFan. First a little background... My first glimpse of how wonderful news photography and screen savers are together was when I visited Andy Rhinehart at the Spartanburg Herald-Journal on 2/15/05. He had to go to a meeting, and left me in his office to check email, update my blog using my laptop. HIs PC of course went into screen saver mode, and started showing pictures of various political leaders in meetings around the world and sporting events, people digging out of snow storms. It didn't take long before my eyes were fixed on his screen.  Later I found out that everyone at AP does this too.  If you have a folder of new pictures on your LAN it makes a fantastic source of distraction. But it's different from video because it's silent. You can have a conversation about what's on the screen without interfering with it, or try to have a conversation about something else entirely.  This is something we noticed about podcasting too, that sometimes less is more. Because there is no video you can: 1. Use your eyes for something else, like driving, walking, doing housework. 2. Use your imagination in ways you can't with video, imagine what the speakers look like, where they are, who else is there. Once your imagination is activated in one direction it goes off in others.  So photocasting or picturecatching, whatever it ends up being called, has a similar "less is more" dimension.  So then I tried an experiment, I put an early version of FlickrFan on a 46-inch screen in my den, and when people would come over to visit I'd leave it running and we'd talk about whatever we were going to talk about, and I wasn't surprised to see the attention drift over to the TV. It's captivating. So I'd like to try it in two new venues to see what happens. 1. In a reception area in an office. Imagine one of the buildings at Microsoft. Or a doctors office, or the lobby of a VC firm. Install a big flatscreen TV on the wall, with a Mac Mini behind it, with a net connection, and let it run. See if people don't gravitate to it. See if people don't want to have meetings in the lobby. (I think some might.) 2. At a conference, like Demo or Davos, scatter four screens around the main lobby (not the meeting room), with one Mac driving them all or each with its own Mac Mini. Again see how it affects the dynamic. You might want to show pictures taken at the conference for a unique recursive effect. Or just use the AP news photo feed. Either would be sufficient to learn how it works. I bet we would learn a lot. Let me know if you decide to give it a try, and by all means please blog about your experiences, share what you learn with the rest of us.
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Digital technology changes from workhorse to entertainer.
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âOne of the best new features in all of the Final Cut Studio family,â maintains Kevin McAuliffe (CreativeMac) âis the addition of surround sound mixing to Soundtrack Pro 2.â To illustrate, McAuliffe takes readers step-by-step through a simple âsurroundâ tutorial. âThis great and easy to use feature in STP2,â he concludes, âlets you mix your entire show in surround, export your mix as surround, and then take your submix, switch it back to â1,2â, and you now have a downmix to stereo from 5.1 for a stereo version of your show.â
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A start-upâs first product, modeled on the human ear, curbs background noise.
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After decades of research and development, speech recognition is finally moving toward mainstream use. Advances in statistical modeling, pattern matching algorithms and processing power have
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Christopher Breen  takes us on a tour of Apple TV that begins with downloading the software update and ends with the big questionââHowâs it look?â To which Breen responds, âDarned good.â After renting Live Free or Die Hard. Breen reports that â the picture is great on my 42-inch Panasonic plasma display. With a digital audio cable connected to my AV receiver the movie caused the receiverâs 5.1 Dolby Digital Audio light to glow and the resulting sound was bigger than anything Iâve heard come out of the box previously.â
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Computer simulations of the voice are becoming so good that they might  pose security concerns, a scientist warns.
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First impressions: Favorite games benefit from high-definition display.
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Voice over IP, online presentations, and multiparty video conferencing under consideration.
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Judging by the number of hits tallied for Troubleshooting Linux Audio Part 1 it seems the topic is of interest to many readers. Alas, I must apologize to everyone waiting for the next parts of the series. Various events have kept me from completing it in short order, but you may rest assured that it will return in my next installment. Meanwhile, this week we'll look at two excellent applications that are coming into greater use here at Studio Dave, the LiVES video editor for Linux, and Reaper (yes, again), a native Windows audio/MIDI sequencer running under Wine.
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This week we look at some of the production improvements, such as Flash SWF recommendations, Express Show, additional playback options, the onyx template for video instead of SWF, and options for sharing your video, including FTP and Screencast. By Nathan Segal. 0104
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Call Recorder for Skype has been updated with new options and a variety of bug fixes.
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Here's a hands-on look at the moderately priced, multiformat DV-CP802.
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Funny voices are a good thing  in the world of film. And the ability to deliver them is even  better.
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Robust growth across speech markets helps outpace expenses.
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Devices that incorporate speech recognition are starting to hit the mass market, giving users the ability to let their mouths do the walking â and the searching.