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Games Entertainment

Act Like A Real Star Trek Captain: Talk 85

Posted by timothy from the Hab-SoSlI'-Quch!-qoSraj-botIvjaj dept.
Snaller writes: "Partnering up with Game Commander developers Mindmaker, Interplay is promising the world that when their space sim Star Trek: Klingon Academy is released, Trekker happy players will be able to order the crews around simply by speaking to the game - the press release does not specify if it has to be in Klingonese." And if Loki ports it, perhaps they will also come up with a robust, generalized voice recognition system for Linux! :)
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Play Star Trek captain by talking to your computer More

Play Star Trek captain by talking to your computer

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  • Go easy on the guy. Some people set the mode to flat. It's easy to make this sort of mistake.

  • Re:Voice commands (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You're one of those people who at the break of new innovations point at very irrelevant problems in the technology only because your view is so limited.
    Of course those problems will be fixed! You can easily recognize and remember hundreds of people's voices, so at some point, computers can be made that can do it too - and at some point the computers will most probably be better at it than you.
  • The original, I mean, where you had to put pauses between the words. Frankly, that method still works better than our normal speech patterns that tend to run everything together. I imagine French voice recognition must be particularily difficult when it comes to the liasons.
  • What you'll get is "Drive cannot be locked for exclusive use" or smth. like that.
    Propaganda is bad for your health.

  • I've had some experience with voice recognition as a developer. We tried out several voice recognition engines during the development of my company's software. I don't remember which other ones we tried, but the one we spent the most time with was Lernout Hauspie ASR. We even demoed our voice-recognition-capable software at the 1999 ASIS show.

    What became of the code? Nice, big blocks of comments! Speech recognition is now way near ready for just about any application -- that is, any application that can't cope with a 60% success rate. You can expect that figure to head downward if the speaker has an accent, if there are a lot of people in the room, and a myriad of other reasons.

    I wouldn't expect this game to be any different.

  • Others have asked about the potential CPU hit of trying to play a game while having VR processes running, and I was wondering about the CPU-intensive aspect of VR in general. Would it make any sense at all to develop a card that would handle VR processing, much like a graphics card or sound card takes some of the load off the main CPU for output?
  • If anyone has not seen the documentary, "Trekkies". You must see it. It is amazing. The people, the culture of trekkies is astounding. I mean, I was laughing the whole way through the documentary, although I still respect Trekkies. But..learning the Klingon language? I guess it's no different than learning French or Spanish anymore, eh?
  • So when will EVERY article mention "..get linux installed on this thing?"(for hardware) or "port this to linux!"(for software).
  • If it's going to be a trek game, then they have to include these options:

    - Rip off shirt command (Only valid in fight scenes)

    - I'm a doctor not a (non-doctor occupation)

    - You get to talk your computer into self-destructing

    - Find the number 47 sub-plot

  • Command recognition has been around for a fair while now and it is growing more refined all the time. Even the most complicated game won't have any more than 10 basic commands followed by any number of arguments. This isn't anywhere near as complicated as the likes of IBM's Via-Voice, which is full-on dictation software, and I can't really see there being much - if any - learning time for the computer involved

    Having said that, perhaps they might be wise to explore the possibility of releasing a couple of different expansion packs to account for different accents (of English alone); there could well be a few pronounciation discrepancies between, say, Decko from north Dublin and Cletus from Arkansas...:-)
  • Everybody knows that keyboards rule. :-) All hail vi and the command line!
    -----
  • The Swedish railway has a voice-recognition system that you can query over the phone for train time tables. This means it has to recognize city names, time of the day and a handful of commands, like "yes", "no", "earlier", "later", etc. It works tolerably well, I suppose. Sometimes it gets it right on the first try. Sometimes I have to repeat myself several times before it understands. (Annoyingly, it was the city where I live it had the most trouble understanding, and its interpretation didn't even sound close to me.)

    Even when it does work it's vaguely annoying though I can't think of any better way of working things over the phone, short of a live human being. (You do get that if you wait long enough.) I wouldn't want to control my computer like that, but if the developers at Interplay want to experiment with it I'd say let them. As long as they don't make it the only way of communicating with the game.
  • Voice recognition usually requires a headset microphone, but there are better ways. If you're into voice recognition, try the Labtec digital microphone. [labtec.com] This is four microphones and a DSP programmed to create a very directional microphone, packaged as a striplike device to be placed between the keyboard and monitor. US$129. Off-axis noise rejection is way beyond anything you can do acoustically. The technology is from Singapore, and you can read the technical papers online. [bitwave.com.sg]

    I expect this technology to be integrated into keyboards and/or monitors over the next few years. Maybe into phones. Probably into car phones.

  • I think you haven't read up on the language closely enough. The letters used are a transliteration into the English alphabet, so of course they're going to look English! That's like saying Vietnamese is English because it uses the Latin alphabet, or Finnish or transliterated Hebrew for that matter. The sounds are another matter.

    The sounds of Klingon are rather un-English. Of the 26 phonemes (admittedly English-ish in that it's the same number as letters in the English alphabet), 7 (D, gh, H, q, Q, S, tlh) don't occur in English at all, one (') is in English but not as a phoneme, and one (ng) occurs in English, but only at the ends of syllables (and not at the beginnings like it can in Klingon). Sure, we write them with English letters because it's easier to email and all, but that doesn't make the language based on English. Listen to them at http://www.kli.org/tlh/sounds.html [kli.org]

    Moreover, even if the sounds were all common in English, that wouldn't make the language necessarily like English. Most of the sounds in Japanese occur in English (with some differences, admittedly), but that doesn't mean Japanese is English. You can even write Japanese in romaji (English letters); it doesn't change Japanese's Japaneseness. What makes a language unique to itself is mostly its grammar and partly its lexicon.

    Klingon's grammar is somewhat unusual as languages go; quite unlike English, and although strange is really pretty simple compared to most languages (this is not necessarily a good thing if you're really a stickler for verisimilitude: it definitely feels like a constructed language). The word-order, yes; the way verbs conjugate for both subject and object (not unique to Klingon, certainly, but not common either); the handling of subordinate clauses, etc etc. Hey, it's fun.

    As editor of the Klingon Hamlet, I can tell you that there are places where the Klingon text really sparkles... it's just too bad so few people can appreciate it. Ah well.

    The 2000-word lexicon is not as big a deal as you might think--though yes, I do sometimes find myself wishing for a word I don't have. But that figure doesn't include the formations possible with Klingon's very productive suffixes, and also compounds. We translated Hamlet without inventing any new words; what we had sufficed for that. And I've been able to write and chat about all kinds of subjects in Klingon. You'd be surprised what you can do with a small vocabulary and productive ways of increasing it.

    Anyway, looking like English isn't a bad thing in itself anyway, but either way, that's one thing Klingon isn't guilty of.

    Yes, I'm the Assistant Director of the Klingon Language Institute.

  • It isn't passive voice; it sounds that way in English because of the word-order. Some languages just order things differently. Many languages like putting things in subject-object-verb order, and quite a lot prefer verb-subject-object. That doesn't make them less or more active or passive. Klingon 'avwI' HoH HoD means "The captain kills the guard", simple as that, even though the word-order is literally "guard kill captain". To say "the guards were killed by the captain"... I probably wouldn't and just stick with the active phrase, but if you pressed me I could do HoDmo' 'avwI' HoHlu', literally "because-of-captain guards (something)killed"; the "something" indicates an impersonal voice, the closest Klingon has to passive.

    People generally say that Klingon is actually a more action-centered language, because it has more emphasis on verbs than nouns. That may be arguable and may be just an impression, but it holds fairly true.

    Don't impose English's word-order conventions on Klingon!

  • Er, it's petaQ, with an e, not a u. The capital Q is not just a "k" sound, more like a k followed by a "kh" (as in German "ach")... that's not really it, but it's a lot closer. And the apostrophe is a letter, don't forget to pronounce it. Clip the sound off at the end of Qapla' abruptly (glottal stop).

    Sorry, I'm a Grammarian on the Klingon Language mailing list; I watch these things.

  • I can see it now . . . (Score:3)

    by Duxup ( 72775 ) on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @12:02AM (#1067665) Homepage
    No!
    I said WARP SPEED!
    Not GIVE WORF SPEED!

    Someone get that crazy Klingon under controll!
  • Actually, there is one, and it is open source. It's called Sphinx [sourceforge.net] from Carnegie Mellon University, and it's on Sourceforge.
  • How are they going to get this sort of thing to work with Roger Wilco [resounding.com]? I can see it now, the commands you yell will get interpreted by your opponent's computer...

    Doh!

  • Actually, I suspect that a greater problem in the voice recognition will be that most humans speak tlhIngan Hol with a horrible Federation accent. B-)

    Seriously, for the limited set of commands needed, speech recognition even without training should be OK. Note that the commands must be restricted to a small set of specific expressions for this to work well - perhaps Klingon battle language would be best (small vocabulary, few and standardised expressions, sounds cool and very realistic for commanding Klingon vessels).

    Under Linux, problems like a game not being able to handle separate users seem unlikely. Even if a game doesn't support multiple users properly, you can still try keeping multiple versions of save game directories, configuration files, et.c. and juggle them to make sure every user has his own setup (shouldn't be too hard to write a script/batch file to do this - copy user files to game directory, run game, copy user files to user directory).
  • As I get my mpeg server up and running at home, I've been seriously considering building a voice inteface to it. However, one problem that I'm running into is that, in my mind, all computers are supposed to sound like the Star Trek computer (voiced by Majel Barret Roddenberry -- the only person to be in *all* Star Trek incarnations (well, mayby not the animated ones..)).

    Anyway, has anyone built (or does Paramount sell) a set of phonemes with a decent text-to-speech converter that'll make my computer sound like the star trek computer?

  • The correct punctuation would be:

    "You, sir, are a baboon".

    HTH
    HAND
  • We already Via Voice from IBM, and a new package from CMU for doing speech regonition (Sphinx is the name of it, I think). I know that ViaVoice is a general speech recognition (I've used it), and I think that the CMU one is also for general speech, but I haven't tried it, so I wouldn't swear to that in a court of law.

    Besides, for a game, they probably will use a cheat of a general speech recognition system to save CPU cycles.
  • I've used Game Commander with Star Fleet Command. It works fairly well and is actually kind of fun shouting "Red Alert!" and having all your defensive systems come up and start blowing the red alert siren. On the other hand, I've had more than one occasion when I've had to say the command two or three times because it just isn't fast enough or accurate enough. When you're in the heat of battle, having your commands ignored or not executed instantly is a REAL problem. Maybe if it's integrated directly with the game it will work better. Let's hope so.

  • Lunch was aten by Richard

    The guards fell victim to Worf"

    Y'know... for a bunch of active folks, it's sort of surprising that Kling... er... tlhIngan Hol is so mired in the passive voice.

    Why yes, I'm a writer... how could you tell?

  • How big of a slice of the CPU pie does good voice recognition take? Despite improvements across the board in game tech, better framerates are still lusted after in any kind of 3D sim or action game. If I have to sacrifice the game's framerate from 40fps to 25fps just so I can bark Klingon commands to my crew, I'll pass (and chances are, so will a LOT of people).

    You know what to do with the HELLO.

  • In a word, no. As mentioned before, dictation systems require a lot more training. But command systems, where there are a limited number of words the computer is listening for, are much more forgiving.

    I worked up a quick demo of a voice-command system using Microsoft's (I know, I know), SAPI, and it worked equally well for me with my Southern-American Drawl and my boss with his British accent from the very same computer, with no training at all.
  • Why not use French? It has a strongly structered language. Why use a language from a FICTIONAL race, instead of one from the human race? Far more people use french then Klingon. Yes I called it Klingon, and I will continue to call it Klingon.
    Maybe I just don't understand why someone would choose to learn the 'Klingon Language' as opposed to the many Human ones. uman Languages have actually history.
  • Probably not very much for discrete command recognition. I used to turn on the speech input sprocket on Mac games (Marathon II et al) for laughs sometimes, just so I could yell "fist" or "shotgun" in the hopes of scaring my neighbours. It really didn't slow down the game much, even on a fairly slow old system where Marathon II was reasonably demanding. And it did work as one would expect, but I still found I preferred the keyboard.

    Using the same base technology (but not input sprockets), the Mac version of Warcraft II allowed you to speak the names of cheats instead of typing them, which actually did give a slight advantage against Windows network opponents in cheat games. ;) But then Warcraft's a pretty undemanding game to begin with.
  • Yeah, give him a break for that. Now, as for liking Dr. Who... no mercy. Make him bleed.
  • Ahhh, Slashdot... where extremist right-wing propoganda and voice-control technology collide. It's so ... Christmas.
  • Alright, Treksters, take a whack at identifying this man's "God":


    1)Landru
    2)Vaal
    3)Jackson Roykirk
    4)Kirok
    5)R*sh L*mb**gh
    6)The next person who gives him a cookie
    Winners will receive a copy of Violating the Prime Directive : Why Chicks Dig It, by James T. Kirk.*


    *That is, when it's published three centuries in the future. Not six, I might add.

  • Also, there are linguistic problems, like the stupid Trek tagline, "Worf, fire at will." How will the game treat that situation? Will Worf shoot Riker?

    One can only hope.
  • This sounds extremely interesting.

    Obviously, it's a little early to get ones hopes up about a port to Linux, and we'll have to see how well the voice recognition works in the first place, but this does sound like a very interesting idea.
  • Me: Helmsman! Why.... don't.... you respond to my orders? I'm... talking.... just like.... the greatest captain of all! I am... Captain Kirk!

    Computer: Command not understood. Incoming torpedo.

    Me: Damn you, computer! Evasive action!

    Computer: Initiating evasive pattern Delta. Incoming torpedo has missed.

    Me: Hailing frequencies open! Khan, You managed to kill everyone else, but like a poor marksman, you keep missing the target. You... keep... missing... the target.

    Computer: Command not understood. Deleting files.

    Me: Khaaaaaaaaaann!
  • Ok, suppose in the future we are using a lot more of voice recognition software to control our computers in general, more than just in games...as was mentioned with regardst to linux.

    Sounds all fine and good right?...one question: How do I tell my computer to go to Slashdot?

    Think about it...I'm gonna have to spell it?..heehee...or perhaps, if implemented the other way, slashdots daily hit count will quadruple instantly...

  • There already is a robust voice recognition system for Linux. ViaVoice has been ported (well Betas avilable anyway) by IBM. The Beta can be downloaded for free and there text to speech as well as voice recognition demos.
  • I'd rather not talk to my computer, really.

    First of all, you can't just talk to the computer and expect it to know what you're saying. You have to spend time teaching the computer your voice and accent. If you voice ever changes, like you go through puberty or get a cold, then it won't recognize your voice any more.

    Likewise, anyone else who wants to talk to the computer has to create a different profile. Say your girlfriend, roommate, or whoever wants to play Klingon Academy, too. Well, I hope that the game takes that into account, or else it will erase your voice setup. I always hated that MS DOS games were single user, in the sense that my dad and I couldn't play the same game with different save game directories. We had to install the game twice, once for him and once for me, which used up massive amounts of disk space.

    Also, there are linguistic problems, like the stupid Trek tagline, "Worf, fire at will." How will the game treat that situation? Will Worf shoot Riker? Obviously, this isn't a circumstance that will happen, but the English language is really rather complicated and difficult to understand when spoken aloud. When written, grammar mostly allows us to understand what is meant.

    Well, that's my pessimistic, cynical rant for today.
  • and say "File...Exit...Yes"
  • I've seen the Game Commander in action last year, but with MechWarrior II or III (sorry, I'm no gaming buff). It certainly looked cool, the way the guy controlled the Mech by joystick, but used voice commands to handle targetting, speed, weapon selection, firing... Especially since the computer talked back a little too (eg. "Acquire target !" - "Target locked !"). And the recognition was real good too (not surprising, seeing the rather small vocabulary being used). But I think it would be mightily annoying to be in the same room with a guy playing this game all day.

    BTW, I believe this product uses Lernout & Hauspie's speech recognition technology, for all you Flemish Slashdotters out there...

  • So, if you tell the computer to engage the Borg, does it set up all the wedding plans as well? Or do you have to tell it step by step. And my heavens Brain, what would the children look like?

    Forgive me, it's 5am...

  • voice-recognition software to be that good by the time they release? Granted, I'm no expert on voice-recognition, and don't really know how far along it is, but I can't imagine that it will be ready for something like this. It's a great idea, and hopefully someday we'll be able to do most of our tasks at the computer by telling it what to do, but I don't think that this game will be all that great at listening to you and following your orders. Hell, we can't do that ourselves, yet we expect to make machines that do it well?

    --
    TheDude
    Smokedot [baked.net]
    Drug Info, Rights, Laws, and Discussion
  • Everyone knows... The only true Science Fiction on TV or film is Doctor Who!

  • Unlikely the Loki would port Voice Rec... (Score:3)

    by alexhmit01 ( 104757 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @11:17PM (#1067692)
    It seems to me the Loki does straightfoward ports. It appears that they have developed a pretty robust toolset and they are able to port Windows software without too much difficulty. While each game no doubt requires adding to the tool-kit, voice recognition seems a bit off.

    I'll be the first to admit that I haven't messed with sound much on Linux. My old 1.x kernel based Linux install choked on my PAS 16, and currently my Linux box is without sound... it all runs through the X Server on my NT machine.

    However, from what I have seen, sound still doesn't have the super flexible API that MS produced. Quality or not, MS finally has a system for accessing sound cards without too much trouble. I have no doubt that Linux is pretty far along by now, but I doubt that sound integration is THAT pleasant. IIRC, there are two sound driver models... which is an improvement, but I don't see anything approaching DirectSound for at LEAST 6 months to a year.

    Loki would no doubt reinvent the wheel. If the system that they bought/licensed abstracts enough, maybe they can plug in Linux sound support. But if the Linux sound capabilities isn't as flexible as the DirectSound, I wouldn't expect it.

    Also, while porting old games is possible, most Linux users/gamers maintain a Win9x dual boot for games, releasing a Linux version a year down the road sounds like a bad business. Even if initial sales are solid, the later games will fail. While the novelty of a Linux port is solid in the beginning, in the end, how many people want to buy old games.

    To get Linux ports, the userbase must demonstrate that there is a market (I believe there is, while Linux marketshare > %Windows users that are games), and must demonstrate that it is important to satisfy this market.

    The trick is, companies must believe that a Linux port 6-12 months down the road isn't good enough. That requires companies that simultaneously release their versions see a large portion of Linux sales. If that happens, than maybe companies start working with Loki to port their game once the engine is largely complete. I mean, if properly abstracted, the game can write code that Loki can rewrite with their tools, and then the game is a straight recompile.

    In a group project I was on, one person basically spend a day abstracting 1-2 line commands into a simple API. If we had to switch systems, he could rewrite his API in a day on the new system, and the higher level code would work without changes.

    Portable code isn't difficult, you just abstract out all the hardware dependent features, and then have someone reimplement them. This may result in more work in the initial development, but it makes porting easier. Much like abstracting assembly code carefully, DirectX and other OS specific calls need to be abstracted away, so that they can reimplement on another system without trouble.

    Alex
  • >You sir, are a baboon.

    But Star Trek:The Next Generation and it spin-offs along with Trekkies still suck.....
  • Somebody moderate this NAZI down to -10000
  • By the way, "tlhIngan Hol" is the name of our language ;) Good parts about the language? Power in the speech pattern. It is standard talk in the form of object->verb->subject. So "Lunch was aten by Richard" and "The guards fell victim to Worf" is kinda cool. That, and in order to learn it, you'll have to find the books (Power Klingon!) and fork over some cash for them. However, the sad stuff is letters and syllables of the language are much too closely derived from english, infact, slightly simpler. Really bad is the fact that only 2000 words actually exist in the language. Still, maybe one day I'll purchase the Klingon edition of Hamlet. :)
  • It still exists and is still being developed. Parts of it were used in Office 2K and will probably be in Office 2001 as well.

    My Webcam [michaelcreasy.com]

  • Klingon Language (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    English, due to it's "odd" structure is probably not all that well-suited to speech input. It seems likely that Klingon, being a synthetic language (and far more successful than Esperanto as an international language) may be better suited to computer-based recognition.

    If this puppy does work, well, that's just one more reason to learn it (though the "alphabet" of characters may not be all that trivial to learn).

    So we'll have a whole BIG bunch of kids who understand this...

    Hmmmm...

    See: Klingon Language Institute [kli.org]

  • I don't know if it's fair to say that MS forgot about Agent, it's been subsumed into Windows 2000, and IIRC, it powers the TTS module that's used for the accessibility reader function.
    Additionally, it's pretty simple to write application for it to enable dictation and menu control, I had set it up to allow me to play old arcade games through MAME via keyboard mappings.
    To honest, the only games that it was reasonably successful with were Gorf, Galaxian and Space invaders, but, hey, it was a laugh.
    The biggest problem I had with it was that it expected a North American accent, and the only way I could get it to launch Word was to pronounce it 'Woid'.
    The agent aspect of it doesn't have to be visible, but it did have to be running in the background to catch your commands.
    It was quite a novely being able to shout 'computer, internet, browser' across the room, and have it wake and dialup, but after a while it became a bit dull.
  • Sure, voice recognition that does Klingon, neato. But I've been waiting for voice recognition that can understand my Scots accent. You'd hope that, being a Star Trek game, that would be included.

    "Its the dilithiummm crystals cap'ain, they jus' canny handle it"

    ZamZ
  • Bleh. Romana and K-9 should have gotten their own bullets. Scrappy Doo was better than those two fucking retards.

    They call em 'sidekicks' cos that's what most people feel like doing to em after about half an hour.
  • "Shell, start Netscape. Netscape, go to site slashdot dahdorg." How difficult is that?
  • Yeah, after a long gaming session, a fella's voice would tend to get hoarse.
  • I submitted this story a week ago and it was rejected. What's up with that?

    See this article [yahoo.com] .

  • I would love to get a Voice reconition program for linux, The reason is that I have a hard time spelling due to a LD (the way that I got the LD was that when I was born I was deaf for the frist 3 years of my life, because of this I missed the language development that most other people get to have). It would be nice to beable to train the computer to my speach patern and have it do the typeing when I have to write a report for a class.
  • shameless plug: xvoice can voice control your linux box today, using IBM's ViaVoice. http://xvoice.sourceforge.net. It's a non-integrated solution. It converts voice commands (defined by BNF grammars) into X events using Xtest. I write code by voice regularly, to avoid wrist and elbow pain.
  • Bah... I find Red Dwarf much more entertaining.

    It's cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere
    I'm all alone, more or less
    Let me fly far away from here
    Fun, fun, fun in the sun, sun, sun

    I want to lie shipwrecked and comatose
    Drinking fresh mango juice
    Goldfish shoals nibbling at my toes
    Fun, fun, fun in the sun, sun, sun
    Fun, fun, fun in the sun, sun, sun
  • If they're using Lernout and Hauspie's speech recog system, it is already good enough in the context of the game play. ViaVoice and Dragon I suspect are also just about if not already ready. L&H's demo back over 5 years ago that I had the pleasure of playing with was unbelievable. Speaker independant. Over 50K word vocabulary. Got it right even in fairly noisy environs.
  • And if Loki ports it, perhaps they will also come up with a robust, generalized voice recognition system for Linux! :)

    Or they might be bound by contract not to spread the undoubtedly proprietary voice recognition software around to all and sundry. I wonder which is more likely?

    Incidentally, do Loki provide source for their ports, or are they provided as binary-only?

  • Do you get bonus points for overacting?
  • Voice-recognition interpretation:

    Hell, target nets cape. Nets cape, go to sight /.. orgy.
  • And IBM ViaVoice can time every thing you say just par fetch. IBM ViaVoice is Hollie God at timing its own nude.
  • Okay, here goes. Star Trek kindled several ideas in modern device design, interface design, and scientific endeavors.

    Quite frankly there are folks who read Slashdot other than yourself (shocking, I know) and some of those folks actually have *interest* in the article. It's kind of interesting because, if it weren't for the silly "talking to the computer" back in the 60's on Star Trek, then there probably wouldn't have been quite as much interest in speech recognition research.

    Quite frankly, the intended goal is to be able to say, "Computer, what is the status of the warp core?" and get the intended answer. Really. That's all. And to make it look as effortless as it is in the make-believe world of Star Trek.

    Did you see the movie Galaxy Quest? What a lot of people honed in on was the intended inference that, hey, some folks just don't get it that Star Trek is all *fiction.* What most folks thought the intended target was was the hardcore fan. I say it was the kooky engineer type that's so brilliant that they *may* be able to cook up a working transporter in their garage, given the time for research, but just don't get it that Jimmy Doohan and Leonard Nimoy weren't engineers and scientists, just actors, and that the technology that was cooked up for the show was just plot devices, nothing more. I cracked up when Mathazar said, "the organ regeneration chamber is coming along nicely." Heh, we have communicators (flip-phones) hypospray (albiet painful, I'm told), tricorders (actually sold under that name) computers we can have semi-intelligent conversations with, and, I'm told, a good chance of having warp drive within the next 100 years. All from just one stupid show with NO scientific basis (in the beginning) whatsoever.
  • THat's what I did moments after and then she broke up, never to be seen again... shame on a first date.......
  • oh, you poor thing.
  • No, I don't like Star Trek for its feeble attempts at indoctrination and social conditioning disguised as an "optimistic" view of the future.

    Ahhh, so you prefer the indoctrination and social conditioning that you received.

  • Re:Voice Recognition (Score:3)

    by skinhead ( 152780 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @11:27PM (#1067716)
    Just in case anyone else was wondering, it can be downloaded here. [ibm.com]
    And here [gatech.edu] is a good "How to get started" -document.
  • >I'd rather not talk to my computer, really.

    Me neither. I had some voice recognition software a while back, but I deleted it as I felt so incredibly stupid talking to the computer.
  • Maybe someone is already working on a voice virus? One day you will get a mail containing a .WAV file: Oooh! I love you, baby! (whisper) Su: password. rm -rf * (laughing) Game over, dude!
  • And if Loki ports it, perhaps they will also come up with a robust, generalized voice recognition system for Linux! :)

    Actually, there already is one. IBM's Via Voice [ibm.com] should do everything you need. Freely available, IIRC, but not open source.

  • A voice-controlled application with a limited context can indeed be made both speaker- and dialect-independent (within reasonable limits of course) and also without the need of lengthy training sessions. The problems you refer to typically occur when a system has to be able to do very hard things, such as taking dictation of arbitrary sentences with very large vocabularies into a word processor.

    This is a common misunderstanding, probably because most commercially available voice-controlled applications today are dictation systems, quite different from what seems to be imagined in the Star Trek case.
  • Congratulations, you win the doofus of the day award! It's Star Trek, not StarWars, thats a whole diferent universe ;)
  • You have to spend time teaching the computer your voice and accent. If you voice ever changes, like you go through puberty or get a cold, then it won't recognize your voice any more.

    I'm actually very suprised by this. Is it really so? I mean, voice recognition was at this level years ago. Hasn't there been any development, like computer being able to recognize you even if you have cold?
  • Uhm, anyone remember the disaster with the supposedly voice-enabled Star Trek Encyclopedia?
    Worked about as good as the ST:TOS M5 supercomputer.
    CAN'T... interpret... comand.
    Your voice ... IS... not... Shatnerized...ENOUGH!
  • Walk into a room full of Windows boxes. Say "format see colon..... yes"

    And listen as the whirring starts....

  • yeah, remebered playing around with the voice recognition stuff that came with my good ol'SB AWE 32. I'm sitting there trying to teach the computer to recognise my commands, shouting things like UP!, LEFT! OPEN! CLOSE!, etc, etc... After an hour or so my girlfriends just bursts out in laughter, telling me that one of the more pathetic things I've done in a long time... Realised she was quite right and haven't touched it since then... oh well

  • How to speak "Klingon" (Score:3)

    by citizenc ( 60589 ) <cary AT glidedesign DOT ca> on Wednesday May 17, 2000 @01:52AM (#1067727) Journal
    Speaking Klingon (_NOT_ "Klingonese", I'm a Trekkie, and proud of it dammit!) is pretty easy =)
    1. First, spend a few minutes thumping your chest and snarling. This language is mostly about attitude.

    2. Say "Ha! Ha! Ha!" as loudly as you can to get used to forcing sounds up from your diaphragm.
    3. The most important word to know is "Qapla'" (pronounced "kap-LA!"), which is a way of wishing people "Success!" Imagine at least five scenarios where you might say this and grunt it out as loudly as you can, putting heavy emphasis on the second syllable.
    4. The second most important word to know is "putaQ" (pronounced "poo-tak"), which is a nicely general insult.
    5. There, now you have a sentence, "Qapla' putaQ!" (I wish you success, you jerk!) Go up to someone you don't like, thump your chest, snarl, and grunt very loudly, "Qapla' putaQ!"
    6. Run.
    Also, there is an official Klingon/English, English/Klingon dictionary available, appropriately titled "The Klingon/English Dictionary [amazon.com]" =)


    .- CitizenC (User Info [slashdot.org])
  • That makes me very angry.
    Mr. Flibble is very angry.

    (And moderators? If you are thinking about marking my post as Troll or Offtopic, go out and watch a few Red Dwarf episodes and the above will become clear...)
  • ...that does Klingon. How, umm, useful? I wonder what would be the Klingon version of "file! exit! no!" that I could shout to really annoy everyone using it near me ;-)
  • Alright, this question regards Windows, but all this talk about speech rec got me thinking. A while ago, MS came out with a system called Agent, which was intended as a text-to-speech/speech rec system represented by a cute animated figure on the desktop. I have to admit that it sounds cool. I downloaded the basic engine and the text-to-speech bits. The characters (the default is a genie) can be fully downloaded or downloaded as a web page downloads. There is/was an example that used a talking parrot sitting on a page, which loaded quite fast, even for my 56k dialup. The small text-to-speech engine was rather impressive for a free download, much better than my old hardware speech synth for my TI-994A. Even an VB idiot like myself could use the API to use text-to-speech in VB script to make a really bad talking clock.

    Right now, I'm looking for the speech rec engine to see how well it works. Using the damn search engine comes up with developer info about the product.

    Why has Microsoft "forgot" this rather impressive bit of software? I know it's really just eye-candy, but you can't have too many toys to play with. :)

  • Am I the only one who thinks that trying to control a game by barking commands would be rather annoying? I mean, think about how annoying it is when you're playing Quake and you click the mouse button and it doesn't fire. Now imagine you yell a command (say, "attack.") and the computer misinterprets it as something else (say, "go back.") You're about to blow the hell out of a Klingon ship or whatever, and instead you start retreating and get shot in the ass.
    --
  • As someone who does a bit of Natural Language processing, you would not need to tune it to your particular voice, and I suspect the game makers haven't. It would presumably work on particular commands and a limited speech interpreter, as the problem of getting something to actually understand english is far beyond the scope of a game. Even Star Trek. However, a list of up to 50 or 60 commands done on keywords would be relatively simple to implement with current methods, and (I would say) pretty useful

  • Think about the effect this technology could have on overenthusiastic eight year olds. It would encourage dancing around and screaming like Klingons all day and night.

    There would be numerous broken windows and furniture, it'd be impossible to get any sleep and maybe even a couple of bodies lying in the garbage given enough time. (It is an empty shell - dispose of it as you see fit.)

    That aside, I think it's quite a cool idea. Consider how much poor, defenceless hardware that would be saved by this! :)

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