Links for the Weekend: September 9-10

I wonder if Vista's voice recognition got any better since that embarrassing demo given a few months ago. I think they said it can follow commands well, but when it comes to processing speech into sentences, it sucks.

Either the speech command recognition is amazingly good, or it works better when you talk with an accent. OS X's command recognition isn't too great, but maybe it's actually because I speech English too well. Seriously, I couldn't tell what the man in the 2nd video was saying.

Vista tattoos? Heh. I've seen a lot of fanatics get Apple logo tattoos. Maybe the "Vistas" and the "Macs" will be the new Bloods and Crips.

Actually, the vista tattoo was the one Mash got the other day.

Just kidding.

I've actually never tried voice recognition on either OS's but I hope Leopard's is better than that. It looked pretty good on the Keynote but who knows if that was actually live or just pre-recorded.

I also saw a follow-up of that video and MS blamed the crowd for the noise. They also neglected the fact that it screwed up before the crowd spoke a word. Alltogether, that would be very embarrassing.

And just for the heck of it, I was inspired to create/find a new sig while writing this story. My MacBook only crashed twice while writing that story. I'm gonna try and find some kind of thing to count by the second how long its been since my MB has crashed, then I'd reset it every time it crashed. Then I'd use that as my sig. Good idea isn't it?

iColon.... no one else finds that funny? Why not just call it iBowels...

I love the idea for the sig Kevin!

I have just got myslf a new laptop and it has only hanged once.

However, it went through a "phase" of convincing itself it didn't have an IR receiver so it deleted frontrow.app and wouldn't let me install it again. So I had to run a hacked version lol.

The new 24" iMac(found in a subsequent link on one of those links) sure looks nice.

I've actually never tried voice recognition on either OS's but I hope Leopard's is better than that. It looked pretty good on the Keynote but who knows if that was actually live or just pre-recorded.

Apple never demonstrated speech recognition during the WWDC. The only thing they showed off was text-to-speech. I'm talking about speech-to-text (voice recognition.) Bleh, anyway I don't mean to get so technical about it.

I'm pretty sure their text-to-speech demo was a recording of how the new Alex voice really sounds. It couldn't have been actively reading the boiler plate, or else it means they somehow managed to make the program actively use Microsoft's speech technology to use the Vista voice. Even though it likely was just a recording of each different voice for the sake of comparison, I think the Alex voice really sounds that way. You can ask any person running the Leopard preview build.

True Takuro, I kinda under-thought what i was saying.

Also, good news. My MacBook is now not shutting off randomly. In fact it won't even turn on. Yeah so that explains what I've been up to lately. The Apple Tech guy over the phone had me take out my RAM then put it back in. Of course it won't start now. Man this is a pain.

And yes, the name iColon is a little goofy. What exactly does the word 'colon' have to do with the menubar? Anyways, i still like the app.