Hollow Voice

A couple of O'Reilly Radar articles came across my desk today. One about an NSF grant to translate American Sign Language to verbal speech and another about Google's real reason for the GOOG-411 service. Tim O'Reilly finds the truly multi-modal interface of gesture recognition to speech synthesis interesting, and he thinks Google's real reason for the 411 service is to harvest voice data. Both are short and interesting reads. It's on the horizon, folks.

Tomorrow I'll be attending the DCampSouth unconference tomorrow here in Raleigh, North Carolina. You can check out the Wikipedia definition of an unconference, but basically it's a small conference where the content is created by participants in real time, not planned out in detail beforehand. I've never been to one before, and I'm looking forward to it!

From their website: "The goal of DCampSouth is to bring together people of all professions interested in user experience and design, to help foster communication between professions, and help foster community. Oh, and to have a lot of fun in the process."

I'm going to host a small session, giving a quick overview of the open source speech technology I've been uncovering lately. I'm hoping to meet some cool design and UI folks and just generally geek out!

(P.S. If you're attending, you ought to sign up on the DCampSouth social network on CrowdVine!)