Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Talking to your dog....

....with a computer?

Many people dont know it, but Windows XP has a text-to-speech tool. You type in a phrase and then the computer "says" it. The voice is kind of unrealistic. Windows Vista's version is better... funny enough the voice is called "Anna."

I thought for fun, I'd try typing all kinds of explosive dog trigger phrases into it and see if I could get any reaction from Sookie:

"Want to go for a walky? Walky?"

"Treat? Do you want a treat?"

"Car ridy? Want to go for a car ride?"

No reaction.

Then I tried the "irritation" approach and just kept saying:
"Sookie... Sookie.... hey Sookie..."
In this case I started getting some heavy breathing, but no obvious recognition.

Then I tried a new technique... the computer says Sookie 9 times, and then *I* say 'Sookie' on the 10th time. The time I said it, she jumped up and ran over to me.

Conclusion: Sookie has a jaded sense of "real" and "pretend" things.

6 comments:

Kennie said...

Or ... Sookie just knows that she shouldn't listen to a Windows machine ... smart doggy!

Jackie S. Quire said...

how do I play with this! Do tell!

Aleks said...

Easy!
Start->Control Panel->Speech

Shelagh said...

That was a great mental image... Thank you!

Anonymous said...

On the reverse side, I used to use a speech recognition software for some work I was doing from my home office. My dog used to sit next to me and every once and a while, would make one of those "give me attention growls". It took me a bit to figure out where all of the extra "him" inserts were coming from in my text I was dictating. Every time my dog growled, the speech recognition software recorded it as "him".

Aleks said...

Hahaha. Yea, speech recognition software is always so colorful in its misinterpretations.

I personally have tried Dragon NaturallySpeaking, because I wanted to try and 'speed up' my writing process (since Jen will tell you, I'm a talker).

But in the end, I couldn't get it trained to the point where it was actually HELPING me, and switched back to typing.

One of my friends has a bizzare and tedious process; he writes short stories on paper, and then types them in later (with two fingers, of course). It takes FOREVER.