Category: gadgets

I’m not sure if you heard, since nobody seems to be talking about it, but there’s an eclipse tomorrow. Everybody’s all excited about it, except my grandma who hopes it will be too cloudy for people to stare at the sun and do dumb things. I get that the moon will block out the sun, but I don’t know if I’ll truly get what the fuss is all about. But maybe this neat little app might help.

Winter and a small team have now launched Eclipse Soundscapes, an app (already on iTunes with a Google version expected before Aug. 21) which can provide various ways for visually impaired and blind users to experience the eclipse.
The first experience will be to hear what’s happening; with help from the National Centre for Accessible Media the app will give “illustrative descriptions” of what’s happening during the eclipse. The descriptions can be read either by the voiceover option on a smartphone or through a recording on the app, Winter said.

Pretty freaking cool!

It reminds me of one time when there was an especially spectacular lunar eclipse. I can’t remember what year it was. Mom and dad took a piece of paper representing the moon and cut out pieces to show me how much was left and the shape the remaining visible moon made. At the time, all I did was sort of look at it and go “Hmmm cool I guess.” and run away to do something stupid and childlike, but now I appreciate what they were trying to do, and think they were pretty cool.

I downloaded the app, and it looks like they have plans to have it work for future eclipses and other astronomical events. How awesome is that? Plus, the NCAM is involved, so I’m sure it will be amazing.

I imagine being as distracted tomorrow as the folks staring at the eclipse through their glasses if I end up playing with this app.

I realize this news isn’t exactly breaking, but there are only so many times you get to celebrate the death of something as goddamned irritating as Adobe Flash, sooooo…

Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash, a once-ubiquitous technology used to power most of the media content found online, will be retired at the end of 2020, the software company announced Tuesday.
Adobe, along with partners Apple Inc, Microsoft Corp, Alphabet Inc’s Google, Facebook Inc and Mozilla Corp, said support for Flash will ramp down across the internet in phases over the next three years.

After 2020, Adobe will stop releasing updates for Flash and web browsers will no longer support it. The companies are encouraging developers to migrate their software onto modern programming standards.

To be fair, Flash wasn’t all bad. I think it’s safe to say that without it, the internet would be a drastically different place. YouTube, for instance, absolutely would not be what it is today had Flash not been around in 2005. For that reason, it deserves to be celebrated as the groundbreaking innovation it so clearly was.

But at the same time as it has absolutely been critically important to the evolution of the web as we know it, it’s also been responsible for some of the most frustrating, screenreader inaccessible user experiences in the history of the fucking earth. Ucking ear, reenreader periencfucking earth.

Sorry, most of you. That’s a little humour for any of my fellow screenreader users who have ever been caught in bouncing Flash animation hell while just trying to read a frigging webpage, a group I like to call all of us. And it is for that reason, not to mention the button button button button flash movie start flash movie end phenomenon and the countless dangerous security flaws it’s responsible for that it deserves to be thrown into a pit far underneath hell, never to return.

Good riddance and thank you all at once, you brilliant piece of garbage you.

I know this is old, but in a sense, it’s really old, so it doesn’t matter.

A long time ago, I came across an article about talking dolls invented by Thomas Edison. These things, although technological marvels for the time, could give you nightmares. Observe.

Ok ok, you can take your hands off your ears now. Seriously. If you think those little kids reading prayers in horror movies are spooky, they have nothing on these big ol’ creepy dolls. Apparently, they looked just as creepy as they sounded.

In early April 1890, each doll that emerged from Edison’s vast West Orange, New Jersey, site stood 22’ inches tall, weighed a heavy four pounds, and sported a porcelain head and jointed wooden limbs. Embedded in each doll’s tin torso was a miniaturized model of his phonograph, its conical horn trained toward a series of perforations in the doll’s chest, its wax recording surface etched with a 20-second rendition of one of a dozen rhymes, among them “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “Jack and Jill” and “Hickory Dickory Dock.” With the steady rotation of a hand crank located on the doll’s back, a child could summon from the doll a single nursery rhyme.

Even back then when they were an amazing technological feat, they didn’t sell too well. Gee, I wonder why! For $20, which was the equivalent of $574 in 1890’s money, you could have a heavy, fragile, buggy doll which you hand-cranked to get often incomprehensible speech. Notice how that video says “restored” on it. Eek!

When I was a kid I always wanted talking dolls. Maybe my mom should have showed me an Edison doll. I never would have wanted one again!

I haven’t tried it for myself just yet since this is the first I’ve heard of it, but if Microsoft’s Seeing AI app works as advertised, holy shit!

Seeing AI, a free app that narrates the world around you, is available now to iOS customers in the United States, Canada, India, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Singapore.
Designed for the blind and low vision community, this ongoing research project harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to open up the visual world and describe nearby people, text and objects.

The app uses artificial intelligence and the camera on your iPhone to perform a number of useful functions:

• Reading documents, including spoken hints to capture all corners of a document so that you capture the full page. It then recognizes the structure of the document, such as headings, paragraphs and lists, allowing you to rapidly skip through the document using voiceover.
• Identifying a product based on its barcode. Move the phone’s camera over the product; beeps indicate how close the barcode is – the faster the beeps, the closer you are – until the full barcode is detected. It then snaps a photo and reads the name of the product.
• Recognizing people based on their face, and providing a description of their visual appearance, such as their gender, facial expression and other identifying characteristics.
• Recognizing images within other apps – just tap Share, and Recognize with Seeing AI.

In addition to full documents and barcodes, it will also be able to read things like signs and labels, which if done well could be a pretty big step up from what the still awesome and useful TapTapSee does now. Oh, and it will even try to describe any picture you take in detail, a handy feature for anyone who has ever let a sighted friend borrow their phone or had one take a photo for you only to discover that they actually took 12 of them.

And remember, all of this is free. Maybe it’s only free because it’s a research project, but if it’s going to lead to greater accessibility in all sorts of mainstream applications down the line, who cares?

These Lyrebird people haven’t yet reached Adobe VoCo levels of voice fakery, but they’re getting there. And though their aim is to sell their technology to companies whose products include speech synthesis, once it’s widely available, the implications are quite similar.

What you’re listening to is a Lyrebird generated Donald Trump, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton talking about the company. Right now they sound quite low quality and computer generated, but with the arguable exception of Hillary it isn’t hard to figure out which voices those are. And though it may be tempting to write that sample off as digitized garbage and move on, it’s worth keeping in mind that those voices are as close to the genuine article as they are after the use of voice samples under a minute long as opposed to the 20 minutes required by VoCo.

This is all made by possible through the use of artificial neural networks, which function in a manner similar to the biological neural networks in the human brain. Essentially, the algorithm learns to recognize patterns in a particular person’s speech, and then reproduce those patterns during simulated speech.

“We train our models on a huge dataset with thousands of speakers,” Jose Sotelo, a team member at Lyrebird and a speech synthesis expert, told Gizmodo. “Then, for a new speaker we compress their information in a small key that contains their voice DNA. We use this key to say new sentences.”
The end result is far from perfect—the samples still exhibit digital artifacts, clarity problems, and other weirdness—but there’s little doubt who is being imitated by the speech generator. Changes in intonation are also discernible. Unlike other systems, Lyrebird’s solution requires less data per speaker to produce a new voice, and it works in real time. The company plans to offer its tool to companies in need of speech synthesis solutions.
“We are currently raising funds and growing our engineering team,” said Sotelo. “We are working on improving the quality of the audio to make it less robotic, and we hope to start beta testing soon.”