Here’s a good deed you can do without parting with a single thing. Synthetic voices for people who have lost the ability to speak only come in generic types—think of Stephen Hawking’s voice—but one fascinating project wants to build custom voices for each person. To do that they need your help: specifically, a recording of your voice.
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Listen to super talented voice actor Brock Baker zip through 33 different Simpsons impressions in 5 minutes. His Homer takes a little getting used to but he nails a good chunk of them. There are a few that are pitch perfect (like his Fat Tony). Anyway, it all adds up to a very fun watch.
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Imagine being able to hear a great historical figure’s voice
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It makes perfect sense that as technology progresses (and in the right direction, I might add), things would get more and more complex in the back end, while life becomes (hopefully) easier for the masses. Take the humble phone for example – it has so many functions these days that affect various aspects of our lives, and from touchscreen we are now possibly making the jump to voice control. Enblink happens to jump aboard the voice-control bandwagon by virtue of being an $85 dongle which will plug itself into your Google TV box.
Enblink Dongle Lets You Speak To Your Home Appliances original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Siri has provided iPhone users around the planet with everything from weather forecasts to restaurant reviews, whilst fending off dumb-ass questions along the way. But if you ever wondered who whispered all those sweet nothings, here’s your answer.
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If you’ve ever listened to a recording of yourself and thought you sound completely different, you’re not alone. But more than that, you were also correct. Here’s why it sounds different.
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These days, you don’t even have to ring someone, listen to their spiel and wait for a beep when you can just use apps to send voice snippets. WhatsApp, which recently reached 300 million users, has made its existing experience even easier with a new feature that lets you record and send voice memos with one press of the mic icon. A WhatsApp spokesperson told Engadget that the company has “spent a lot of time refining [voice messaging] and made it really simple to use.”
As a testament to this, WhatsApp has now removed length limits for recorded messages and plays audio within the app instead of opening a media player. Playback will automatically switch from a handset’s speakers to its earpiece when the device is held to your ear, and the mic icon will turn blue when recipients have listened to spoken missives. With the new perks available on the mess of platforms WhatsApp calls home (iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BB10 and Nokia Symbian / S40), we bet everyone with that chatty friend are shaking in their boots.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
Via: AllThingsD
Source: Whatsapp
People who have been blind since a young age can sometimes learn to develop a sort of low-grade echolocation. This technique, used by the likes of Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Ronnie Milsap, and Ben Underwood, works much the same way as it does in bats and dolphins. But people who have just recently lost their sight can’t harness this ability innately. They need the vOICe to do it for them.
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Happy Nerd Christmas! Apple CEO Tim Cook got you a new operating system for the iPhone and iPad. It looks different. It works differently. It has a host of new features and design elements–from full multitasking to the Pandora-like iTunes …
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Though Mozilla has long been a proponent of WebRTC for plugin-free video and voice chat, it hasn’t been ready to enable the full protocol in Firefox as a matter of course. It’s more confident as of this week: the newly available Firefox 22 beta turns on complete WebRTC use by default, allowing for both live web conversations and peer-to-peer file swaps. There’s more to the release as well, depending on the platform. Windows users receive support for HiDPI displays, like that of the Kirabook; every desktop user also gets gaming-friendly OdinMonkey JavaScript tuning, a web notification API and a font inspector. Android users won’t have WebRTC and other upgrades for now, but everyone can experiment with the latest Firefox beta at the source links.
Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Software
Via: Mozilla (1), (2)
Source: Firefox Beta, Google Play
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