Voice
For people without internet access, telephone-based services can still be an invaluable tool for things like finding jobs. Unfortunately, many poor and illiterate citizens of Pakistan simply don’t know how to use such services. In an effort to introduce them to the concepts involved, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Pakistan's Lahore University have launched a “silly phone game” known as Polly. Read More
Concussions should be tended to a soon as possible after they occur, but it’s often difficult to tell whether or not one has actually been sustained, without taking the person to a hospital. That’s why scientists at Indiana’s University of Notre Dame have developed a tablet-based test that detects concussions on the spot, by analyzing the voice. Read More
The University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom has unveiled a virtual “talking head” that is capable of expressing a range of human emotions. The team believes that the lifelike face, called Zoe, is the most expressive controllable avatar ever created, and could one day be used as a digital personal assistant. Read More
Lenovo A586 smartphone debuts voice unlock technology
Like Android 4.0’s Face Unlock feature that unlocks a device when it recognizes the user’s face, Lenovo has made unlocking a hands-free affair, but by using a slightly different approach. The Speaker Verification technology, that makes its debut in the Lenovo Ideaphone A586 smartphone, lets a user unlock their device by speaking a passphrase. Read More
Talking Pedal offers tube-free Talk Box-like guitar effect
Although I grew up surrounded by the big hair rock of Bon Jovi and the like, my first introduction to the Talk Box guitar effect was not Living on a Prayer but Joe Walsh's Rocky Mountain Way over a decade earlier, followed a little later by Peter Frampton's epic Do You Feel Like We Do. Although it continues to be used by a good many guitar gods to this day, the long tube that invariably runs up a microphone stand to the player's mouth does make it something of a special addition to a guitarist's effects arsenal rather than a regular feature. The Talking Pedal from Electro-Harmonix does away with the tube altogether in a rocking chassis expression pedal with no moving parts. Read More
Peavey Electronics and Muse Research have partnered to develop the MuseBox, a rather nifty software-powered, digital sound module, vocal processor, guitar processor and effects processor all-in-one. The half-rack-sized unit features a mind-boggling number of presets, comes supplied with a software package valued at over US$900 and benefits from two pro-grade guitar/mic inputs at the front of the unit with phantom power, stereo, 24-bit, 48 kHz 0.25-inch rear-panel inputs and outputs, Gigabit Ethernet, full-size 5-pin DIN MIDI and four USB 2.0 ports. Read More
Whether it’s people who can’t speak, or musicians looking for a new way of expressing themselves, both may end up benefiting from an experimental new gesture-to-voice synthesizer. The system was created at the University of British Columbia, by a team led by professor of electrical and computer engineering Sidney Fels. Users just put on a pair of sensor-equipped gloves, then move their hands in the air – based on those hand movements, the synthesizer is able to create audible speech. Read More
Nobody likes having to deal with automated telephone services, that say wonderful things like, “You said ‘Beelzebub,’ is that correct?”. Such services may get slightly less annoying, however, thanks to research being carried out at Spain’s Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Universidad de Granada. A team of scientists from those institutions have created a computer system that is able to recognize the emotional state of a person speaking to it, so that it can alter its behavior to make things less stressful. Read More
Chances are that if you're calling 9-1-1 (or 9-9-9, or whatever it is where you are), you're not likely to tell the operator that your case isn't all that urgent, and that it can wait. The problem is, sometimes emergency dispatch centers are so overloaded with callers – all of them stating that they need assistance right now – that some sort of system is required in order to determine who should get help first. Dutch researchers claim to have developed just such a system, which analyzes callers' voices to determine how stressed-out they are. Read More
Over two hundred vocal effects are now within easy reach thanks to VoiceLive Touch from TC-Helicon. Featuring a useful integrated microphone stand mount, the device offers performers touchscreen control over effects such as reverb, delay and pitch correction. There's also multi-layered looping, the facility to store custom settings and inputs for guitar, USB media player and MIDI. Read More
