Speech synthesis (TTS) news

Life is much too serious and we all need more laughter in our lives.

Now that we are starting off fresh in the New Year it’s a good time to bring out your best – your sense of humor combined with your love of new technology.

Speech Technology Group cordially invites you to enter our speech humor contest.

Here is how it work’s – it’s easy:

The best submissions received by January 27th will be posted at http://www.speechtechnologygroup.com

The winner will be announced on February 3rd and gets a Kindle Fire.

Are you game?

For a quick sample to get your juices flowing and to sign up, do to http://www.speechtechnologygroup.com/speech-humor

Imagine a TV that responds to your physical behaviour such as finger pointing, talking and other actions such as picking up a magazine. Basically, it is a TV that watches you via gesture recognition, voice recognition and image recognition and responds accordingly.

Jeopardy! competition is a popular US quiz show featuring trivia in various topics (history, literature, the arts, pop culture, science, sports, geography, wordplay, etc.), broadcasted since 1964. The show has a unique answer-and-question format in which contestants are presented with clues in the form of answers, and they must phrase their responses in form of a question.

From 14-16 February 2011 the first ever man vs. machine Jeopardy competition will be held. Human competitors will fight against Watson, a supercomputer that extracts knowledge from enormous amounts of data at a much faster rate than human beings or any other computer system is capable of.

Ford has filed a patent called “Emotive Text-to-Speech System and Method” describing a system that can not only simulate emotion when reading out directions and describing traffic problems, but could also detect the emotion of the operator of the car and interact with them in ways designed to, oh, soothe a little road rage. The avatar is said to “appear to become frustrated” if the driver is a lead-foot, and may say “Your driving is hurting my fuel efficiency.” Or, if a driver is going too fast, the dash-bound assistant could turn blue, ask what’s wrong, and suggest a more direct route to their destination.