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British text-to-speech will create talking TVs
LOSING A REMOTE CONTROL to change channels might soon be less of a problem with the development of British technology that enables your TV to talk to you.
Ocean Blue Software has developed low cost text-to-speech technology called 'Talk TV', which is being built into set top boxes from Korean company Arion Technology and branded by retailers from August.
Aimed particularly at blind or partially-sighted owners, it can use speech technology to tell them what's on and when it's on. The speed and verbosity of the voice can be adapted, while a different kind of remote control will be provided.
The development has already won design awards, and has been developed with the support of the Royal Institute for the Blind.
The technology has been developed with digital chip company ST Microelectronics, and the next stage of development looks to be that owners will be able to talk back to their TVs using commands such as 'channel up', 'channel down' and 'volume up', 'volume down'.
Talk TV will be available in different languages and dialects. It is slated to support Scottish Gaelic and Welsh in the UK, but it remains to be seen how the technology will cope with the notorious Geordie accent. µ
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Have had a spoken text solution in Sweden, for quite some few years. Its on another digital TV channel, and reads out the text in swedish, via an text to speech synth. The nice thing is, you require no special thing. So you buy one decoder to "see" the program, and another decoder, set it to the other channel, and hears the text.
Simple idea, and useful for sight impaired or blind, actually
"LOSING A REMOTE CONTROL to change channels might soon be less of a problem with the development of British technology that enables your TV to talk to you"
I fail to see the connection. I suspect a talking TV will have you looking for the remote even more than usual
In the cinema you wear headphones.
I have this problem... today a Windows 7 netbook can recognise spoken commands, but IT IS HARDER than converting text data to speech sounds (which the netbook also can do). It isn't the same thing. Do you understand that? Do the people you're talking to about this understand that?
And I don't know if they've touched Gaelic, but good luck to them. There's certainly a worldwide market for that technology.
before an ad shows up that starts with someone saying "volume up, volume up..."
HAHAHAHA If you were blind why would you "watch" TV anyway. seems like a great idea for lazy people who dont even want to lift a remote. now if we can just create IV's for food we would be complete!
Without exploding from the impossibility.
I dont want to sound like Im belittling what Im sure is a fantastic british invention, but... ISTR using text-to-speech in 1982. So this isnt exactly new, is it? Not *as such*.
Anyway, ST Micro are french.