First ever thought-to-speech brain implant successfully trialed

After more than a decade of development researchers at UC San Francisco have demonstrated, for the first time, a brain implant turning neural activity into full words. The first participant in the trial, a paralyzed man in his 30s, can now speak with a… Continue reading First ever thought-to-speech brain implant successfully trialed

Pause Your Tunes When it is Time to Listen Up!

“Sorry. I had music playing. Would you say that again?” If we had a money-unit every time someone tried talking to us while we were wearing headphones, we could afford a super-nice pair. For an Embedded C class, [extremerockets] built Listen Up!, a cutoff switch that pauses your music …read more

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Google Cloud lets businesses create their own text-to-speech voices

Google launched a few updates to its Contact Center AI product today, but the most interesting one is probably the beta of its new Custom Voice service, which will let brands create their own text-to-speech voices to best represent their own brands. Maybe your company has a well-known spokesperson for example, but it would be […] Continue reading Google Cloud lets businesses create their own text-to-speech voices

38 Years Later, The Atari 2600 Learns To Speak

Back in the early 1980s, there was a certain fad in making your computer produce something resembling human speech. There were several hardware solutions to this, adding voices to everything from automated telephone systems to video game consoles, all the way to Steve Jobs using the gimmick to introduce Macintosh …read more

Continue reading 38 Years Later, The Atari 2600 Learns To Speak

38 Years Later, The Atari 2600 Learns To Speak

Back in the early 1980s, there was a certain fad in making your computer produce something resembling human speech. There were several hardware solutions to this, adding voices to everything from automated telephone systems to video game consoles, all the way to Steve Jobs using the gimmick to introduce Macintosh …read more

Continue reading 38 Years Later, The Atari 2600 Learns To Speak

Silicone and AI Power This Prayerful Robotic Intercessor

Even in a world that is as currently far off the rails as this one is, we’re going to go out on a limb and say that this machine learning, servo-powered prayer bot is going to be the strangest thing you see today. We’re happy to be wrong about that, …read more

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Old Rotary Phone Gets Called Into Action

The more glass we punch with our fingertips, the more we miss fun physical interfaces like the rotary phone. Sure, they took forever to dial, and you did not want to be one of those kids stuck with one during the transition to DTMF, especially if you were trying to …read more

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The Internet Controls This Monster

What’s worse than unleashing a monster on the internet? Allowing the internet to control the monster! But that’s just what [8BitsAndAByte] did, created a monster that anyone on the internet can control. Luckily for us, this monster only talks.

This is a very simple project and most of the parts …read more

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Cortana wants to be your personal executive assistant and read your emails to you, too

Only a few years ago, Microsoft hoped that Cortana could become a viable competitor to the Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri . Over time, as Cortana failed to make a dent in the marketplace (do you ever remember that Cortana is built into your Windows 10 machine?), the company’s ambitions shrunk a bit. Today, Microsoft […] Continue reading Cortana wants to be your personal executive assistant and read your emails to you, too