Computer advances I'm STILL waiting for...

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Karlos wrote:

mr_a500 wrote:

5. Speech recognition

Whatever happened to that? I'm not saying I want to type a document by saying it, but it might be good for fast OS access like switching windows, running automated tasks or opening programs. Maybe we've already got this, but I haven't seen it.

This seems to be a feature supported in MacOS X if the speech preferences are anything to go by. That said, I haven't tested it.

I have and it works really well... but I feel uncomfortable have to speak actions which usually I do without thinking about them... Also you can't use it in a socal environment (like a Coffee Shop) and it annoys anyone else in the vacinity.

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Karlos wrote:
I've seen 3D desktop environments tested before. I think the consensus is that they are visually disorienting for too many people to be genuinely useful compared to more traditional methods.

A better system for accessing large amounts of open windows is expose (gah, another mac thing, I must be going soft in my old age), where you can readily see all your open windows on the display in one go...

Expose is great... I'm hunting down a similar function commodity for Windows... I keep hitting the F9 key on my Windoze box expecting to see all my programs...

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Karlos wrote:

bloodline wrote:

I have and it works really well... but I feel uncomfortable have to speak actions which usually I do without thinking about them... Also you can't use it in a socal environment (like a Coffee Shop) and it annoys anyone else in the vacinity.

For a minute I thought you were talking about your [d]socks[/d] mac...

Not sure about annoying but doing it in a coffee shop is likely to put people off their drinks. Especially anything foamed...

:lol:

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JLF65 wrote:

PMC wrote:
Sixteen years ago, my Amiga spoke to me.  It said "Ben smells" and "Paul fan-cies Jenny Leeks".  

Today, synthesised speech still sounds like a Speak 'n Spell.  I want a computer to address me with "Good morning Paul, I trust you are well?" with appropriate attention being paid to tone and inflection.

What HAL9000 got right in 1968 and my Amiga 500 half managed in 1990 has hit a dead end.  Dammit, I want the machine I'm using to talk to me, to explain to me in respectful and apologetic tones exactly why a 2.5ghz machine is taking forever to open another text file or IE window.

You obviously haven't tried speech synthesis in the last decade. You might check out AT&T's Natural Voices.

http://www.naturalvoices.att.com/

Dude, thats worse than the speech synthesis in MacOS X...