The HAL factor

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The HAL factor
by Morty on Monday 20/Dec/2004, @02:41

Accessibility aside, you can't beat the coolness factor having your computer talk to you:-) Using ktts to speak the messages from knotify sounds like fun.

One question tho, since I almost always have music plying. Can you set ktts to fade the volume from the mediaplayer (noatun/juk) to like 25% of current volume before it speaks and turn the volume up afterwards? I don't think playing it on top of the music without doing anything with the volume or temporary stopping it would not give anything particularly comprehendable.

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Re: The HAL factor
by Mathias on Monday 20/Dec/2004, @03:42

file it as a wish on bugs.kde.org... the sooner, the better. should be easy to do via dcop...

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Re: The HAL factor
by mETz on Monday 20/Dec/2004, @10:16

Especially with JuK and Noatun having a similar dcop interface.

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Re: The HAL factor
by Shulai on Monday 20/Dec/2004, @05:24

The coolness factor is the kind of thing Microsoft uses to sell you their soft (despite how much cooler KDE is).
Said that, it's a good to have feature for practical reasons, specially for accesibility ones, and I'm glad this is the path chosen by KDE developers.

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Re: The HAL factor
by Xanadu on Tuesday 21/Dec/2004, @01:22

> you can't beat the coolness factor having your computer talk to you:-)

Agreed, but, I want to be able to talk to it.

IBM's ViaVoice was fairly good. I have a (oldish) copy of ViaVoice from my MDK 8.0 Pro CD's (and for whatever reson the CD that ViaVoice is on can't be read... :-\ - I'm on Gentoo these days anyway). ViaVoice worked when I used it last. I want to be able to have a mic sitting in front of me and be able to say "Computer play eno" and have music play. Can I do this yet?

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Re: The HAL factor
by falonaj on Tuesday 21/Dec/2004, @02:47

> IBM's ViaVoice was fairly good.

I agree. The problem is that IBM still refuses to make ViaVoice available for Linux endusers.

The speech recognition part is not available at all for Linux. The speech synthesis part of ViaVoice is available on Linux for about half of the languages that are supported on Windows, but only if you buy 300 copies at once for $1500 altogether.

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Re: The HAL factor
by Davide Ferrrari on Wednesday 22/Dec/2004, @00:43

I think that "talking to my PC", with the virtual reality stuff, was the biggest and most useless hype of the past years.
Interfaces should be completely differents to be really usable and useful.

And anyway, even if only used as text typing substitute, let's think about the chaos that would be generated in a tipical office...

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Re: The HAL factor
by Josephine on Thursday 30/Dec/2004, @12:05

SO what keeps you from talking back? Use Sphinx and Perlbox Voice (perlbox.org). Installing Sphinx is really trivial and Perlbox will do the rest. Also, Perlbox has KDE desktop integration. Works like a charm to me...

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Re: The HAL factor
by Miguel on Tuesday 21/Dec/2004, @11:51

But what if you want ktts to do karaoke? You won't want it to fade the volume down.

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