so my parents have been away in melbourne since thursday morning, and this means party time.
i have been consuming some form of alcohol, or had large amounts of alcohol in my system consistantly for the last 63 hours. it is probably going to be a few more before last nights is completely gone and i can see this hangover lasting DAYS. it was such a good weekend. trent came over and joined in the festivities on friday night, brought all his mates and made a mess of my house. was worth it tho.
note: martha i have heaps to tell you on wednesday.
i havent done a post in a while so im just gonna put down some definitions from wiki of what is kinda expected from a “tour guide”:
A tourist guide is a person who leads groups of people around a town, museum, or other tourist venue. The tourist guide provides a commentary on the features and history of the location, the tours can be from as little as 10-15 minutes to extended periods over many days. Considerable importance is placed on the guide’s knowledge of local stories, history and culture depending on the location of the tour
A guide book is a book for tourists or travelers that provides details about a geographic location, tourist destination, or itinerary. It is the written equivalent of a tour guide. It will usually include details, such as phone numbers, addresses, prices, and reviews of hotels and other lodgings, restaurants, and activities. Maps of varying detail are often included. Sometimes historical and cultural information is also provided. Different guide books may focus on different aspects of travel, from adventure travel to relaxation, or be aimed at travellers with larger or smaller travel budgets.
Guidebooks can have factual problems, information may be out of date (especially for regions undergoing rapid development), the author may have a hidden agenda (for example free meals or rooms in exchange for inclusion in the book or a favorable review — compare tout). Guide books are generally intended to be used in conjunction with actual travel, although simply enjoying a guide book with no intention of visiting may be referred to as “armchair tourism”.
lots of idea’s there will elaborate on them soon. promise.
after just doing my presentation, i am feeling slightly sad and regret cutting down my original idea’s. Kristina, a very well travelled girl thinks the idea of language translating over sea’s and the use of GPS to track where you’re location is a good idea. So i kinda had anouther mini epiphany…
AN INTERACTIVE GLOBAL TOUR GUIDE.
the use of a “character” would be the same, except now instead of a tutor they woudl be a global tour guide. using the GPS capabilities on the iPhone when activated your guide would inform you of any interesting facts/ information/history etc. about that specific place. when in a country where english is not the native language, guide will teach you phrases and a bit of the local language as part of the tour.
oh k heaps happier with this idea. its basically the same jsut wiht less focus on the language learning, not everyone wants to learn a languge entirely just enough to communicate verbally. i have found through my research that the best way to learn a language is to pick it up naturally by being around those who speak it, this application would just aid/enhance a travellers language learning. the same voice recognition technology will exist so it they do get stuck communicating with a non-english speaker they can choose to translate is roughly (roughly because you arnt depending on on it as a translator just letting it aid you).
so yer its basically the same…. but different. in a good way.
After speaking with rob on friday the fact that i had three different applications that iw as attempting to roll into one became blatently obvious. Out of all of my idea’s however we came to agreement on one which had the most potential.
A mobile language learning application.
Rob suggested first researching language leanring software already avaiable. Rosetta Stoneis the leading software and has won coutless international awards, i hope to meld together its existing technology, language teaching ability and the iPhone unique properties to improve the user’s language learning experience. rosetta identifies the following four area’s as key to language learning:
Listening
Rosetta Stone uses native speakers and everyday language to develop your listening comprehension skills easily and naturally. (the application would do this with the addition of a virtual “character” to futher simulate a natural environment.)
Speaking
Improve your pronunciation by using dynamic speech recognition to compare your speech with a native speaker.
Reading
Develop your reading skills by linking written language to real-life objects, actions, and ideas. (touch screen of the iPhone makes exercises like this more interactive and tangible.)
Writing
Practice writing the language you are learning with the program to guide you. Simply write what you hear, then the program carefully checks your work and lets you correct any mistakes.
what however lacks in Rosetta Stone’s way of teaching a language? i need to ask the users what they would want in an application. show prototypes to those:
looking to learn
learning
have already learnt
or teach
a language. i need to also see and compare other methods of language learning such as tape learning and learning from a teacher. at the moment i see the convienience/mobility of tape learning (car trips) and the humanistic/social elements of learning in a class or from a tutor as being the two elements that could set my application apart for existing computer-learning software.
a little more research and then ill finalize my first itteration for friday.
imagine being in Rio… a handsome stranger introduces himself – in Spanish!
only problem is you dont speak a word of it.
Imagine being able to understand his every word… and speak back!
Select the iTranslate funtion on your iPhone, audio to audio conversation, scroll and select spanish.
his words are interpreted by the phone, and repeated to you in english.
press reply and speak into your phone in english, it will imediately be repeated to your new south american heart throb in fluent and crisp spanish.
so i just spoke to Kaz. i need to make sure that my voice technology software actually works well other wise it will sjtu cause user frustration. i need to figure out how this application relates to the iPhone, that is what about the iPhone makes my application work better ie. the touch screen. i also spoke to him about its possible use as a language learning tool. he suggested reasearching ways in which intereactive leanring of langueages such as i propose wiht my application and tape leaning of language differs. and maybe ask users what tape learning lacks.
i would really like to explore the idea of “virtual characters” and the CrazyTalk software but it moves away from my idea of language translation. i think it jsut employs the iPhone existing features more, such as:
image quality – the screen allows for the creation of life like charaters that will engage the user.
touch screen – the amount of fine motor control the screen allows mean that the facemapping can be done easily
camera – this can be used to take any photo of anyone and then animate them.
and yer thats all i got for now i need to reasearhc some stuff.
oh k im not scrapping the old one i just thought up with a cool new one.
iRecipe, it works backwards you type in the ingredients you have and its spits out a recipe. kinda like Ready, Steady, Cook or one of those shows where they surprise you in the supermarket and have to cook wiht wat you have. it could have a rating system similar to the one george has for his application, but i cant be bothered to re-type, or re-explain. you could search under various topic and sub catergories such as
dinner, lunch, brekkie
or a craving ie salty, sweet, sour
difficulty – ameatur, student, pro,
who you cooking for – family, dinner for two, mates, solo
sorted by chefs – martha stewart, jaime oliver etc.
sorted by cooking and preperation time, etc.
feel free to steal this idea.
i may write more about it later depending on the response.
VoiceOver is equivilent to the text to speech software which i wanted!
and Speech is voice recognition technology!
so basically apple already has all the software i require for my application they just havent come up with the idea to implement it like me!
o and im sooo glad i finished that DECO1005 thing. submitted with less than one minute to go now thats a close call. but yer its over so im happy.
anyway back to my application… to make it more “interactive” the CrazyTalk technology i mentioned in teh previous post could be employed to allow the user to create there own language. that is they use there iPhone to record sound and take a photo of themselves they synthesis it with text. then upload it to the internet to be downloaded by others or jsut to be sent to friends. basically they could create there own personal charater of themeselves. ooo good idea you can send talking sms messages to friends it would be a virtual character of yourself reading out the message. that would be sick!
I NEED SOMEONE TO REPLY TO THIS COZ I THINK MY IDEA MIGHT BE GETTING A LITTLE TOO COMPLEX FOR ONE APPLICATION. ARRGGHHH !!!!
synthesize sound into written text (sound –> text)
translate and communicate sounds into other languages. (sound –> sound)
ONE: There are already many websites that translate text and/or entire webpages such as babelfish, or google translator which means it is very possible for my application to also do this.
TWO: There is also a vast aray of software that converts text into sound. Nuance developed RealSpeak™ it is software that converts text into remarkably high quality speech. Whether you want to speech-enable an in-car navigation system, provide a screen reader for the blind or partially sighted, or enhance your call center service, RealSpeak is the natural solution. Friendly, expressive, highly intelligible quality that speaks for itself.
The the site can be found here. What interested me the most in this was the personality and realism of the voices, it converts text into sound in more than 26 languages and and has 40 different voices with different accents and speaking styles. each of the 40 voices are given names as if they were a real charater. This reminded me of the “interface agents” Rob was talking about today, and gave me the idea of putting a face behind the voice.
for example: an english speaking iPhone user wish’s to learn some phrases in spanish to impress someone. they would first select the language which they wish to learn, then a screen depicting spanish “tutors” would pop up, they would be able to choose who they wish to teach them. for example, a young tanned, dark-haired south american senorita might be selected. then the iPhone user would type in what they wish to learn how to say, or select from common phrases and a tutor would repeat them. individual words could be selected, and sounded out phonetically like in a dictionary and the application could zoom in to a close up of the charaters facial/mouth movements to futher assist in proouciation. the “tutor” would have a certain interation wiht the user that would enhance the learning experience.
similar to my above idea, there are many online sites that have “animated characters” synthesising text into speach , such as haptek which lets you create 3D characters that “talk” (pre-made sayings). CrazyTalk a much more sophisticated software, it focuses more however on letting the user create a charater. this would be an awsome application on its own, but i want to focus on the language part.
“Create and control a virtual cast of live talking characters ready to deliver an animated vocal performance for your video, web, mobile or messaging projects. Just a single photograph, recorded or imported audio, combined with transitional effects, animated illustrations and expressive emoticons, and CrazyTalk’s powerful facial morphing animation technology is all you need to begin creating speaking actors, virtual guides, and digital hosts adding perfect personalities to any multimedia experience.”
the video below shows most of the features on the software and i can definately see how this could be implemented in the creation of “charaters” for my application.
IBM has a less realistic, but fun text-to-speech converter which can be found here. AT&T the iPhones current and only carrier also provides simliar technology here, which suggests that a text to sound application could be a likely future application. it works in conjunction with googles text tranlator, and i see this intergration of technologies being implemented in my application .
oooo i just found a video it just shows AT&T’s voice technology, its more realistic than i originally thought…
oh k so i left this in drafts for the last two days so the date references are a bit out but yer ill continue on..
THREE & FOUR: the next peice of technology is voice recognition, i need to find software that is able to not only able to understand english but many language, and then translate it into any other language either in the form of text or re-vocalising.
VoxTec has a product called the Phraselator® P2, but it only works one-way, translating english into other languages (i counted 44). it does however instantly recognise phrases, which means it doesnt need to be trained to recognise an individual voice, i wasnt sure if this was possible before but this proves it is. VoxTec has been made for the American market and this is why it only reads english, however if this type of technology was to be incorperated into a global product such as the iPhone, it seems very likely that other languages could be “set as default” set as the language ot be translated.
im seriosuly soo tired right now i played my last game of normal soccer today… we won like 8-1 or somthing silly like that. to top it off i have had a nagging cold for the last 3-4 weeks. awsome. k-rod reckons its glandular fever i hope not. but yer i am giving up on the research for now, i will make conclusions and sumaries and stuff about marketing and things in my next blog. really i will, i jsut dont know when it will be.
Listening
Speaking
Reading
Writing
