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Technology

Virtual Newscaster 164

Posted by michael from the not-just-another-pretty-face dept.
Chad Coffman was the first to submit Ananova, an animated character which can "read" news and breaking stories in real-time. Waste of bandwidth? Or broadband killer app?
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Virtual Newscaster More

Virtual Newscaster

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  • Re:L&H RealSpeak (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It *IS* good, but I've been told that to add additional voice "fonts" it takes 6 to 9 months and anywhere from $250K - $500K. Also, it is currently only feasible for a server-side implementation due to the intensive system requirements. They are targeting telephony-based applications first (phone-based systems like banks, etc...).

    My company desires to use that technology with a client-based application and the average machines out there in our user population will not cut it so we are exploring hybrid solutions.

    Anyway, you are very correct in that it seems to be the best yet available!

  • Yes (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But is there a crack to make her read news naked?
  • Can i choose a 6' man who wouldn't be frequenting the spa and getting ready for a spot of skiing?

    Sure you can. Just buy yourself a copy of Maya and build it yourself, if you think there's a market.

    If you don't like what's for sale, don't buy it, but don't expect to get what you want if you're not willing to pay.

  • Can i choose a 6' man who wouldn't be frequenting the spa and getting ready for a spot of skiing?

    Sure you can. Just buy yourself a copy of Maya [sgi.com] and build it yourself, if you think there's a market.

    If you don't like what's for sale, don't buy it, but don't expect to get what you want if you're not willing to pay.

  • What scares me is that there are a shitload of people out there who just want their info shovel fed to them. They don't want freedom of choice, they want freedom from choice.

    It's not denying choice, it's choosing the guidance of a third party. You do it every time you consult a map rather than guess the route.

    If you deny this choice, that makes you a hypocrite.

  • AFAIK two stories have been removed from the main page which were the top story, and now this one takes its place. Come on darnit, enough of the CENSORSHIP here! ;-)
  • Weird stuff, That Linux is Better than Windows one is gone, and now that Roblimo double post of the CSC crack. Time to call in Mulder and Scully.
  • But is there a crack to make her read news naked?>

    You do know, of course, that in the Czech Republic, you can watch the Nude Weather Forecast..

    Who needs art imitating life when life abounds..


    -----

  • Does anyone here remember the movie 1984? It was Richard Burton's last flick, and was IMHO a very faithful rendering of the novel.

    Anyway, the one thing that really stuck in my head was the "newscaster's" voice. The director made the (wise) decision to use the same female voice on all the telescreens whenever any urgent propaganda (i.e. all of it) had to be disseminated.

    It drove me buggy. After a while, that voice was irritating as hell. The perfect reaction was acheived as far as I was concerned..

    So, today we can have the same voice (only in this version, with a face) droning in the same tones etc. about any and all news? And potentially with censored content thanks to mandatory filters in some locations?

    Am I the only one who sees a parallel here?
    -----

  • (You do remember the Eurythmics, right?)

    I definitely place my vote under the "waste of bandwidth" column, but then, after I tried PointCast for about a day, I realized it was a useless distraction for most people and an inefficient method for anybody (e.g. day traders) who needs to know what's going on in realtime -- news radio over the airwaves beats it hands down.

    It's just the sort of neat gimmick the Web biggies -- AOL, Yahoo etc. -- are going to scramble to take over in order to have bragging rights to another, uh, "feature."

    For those of you familiar with the weather-reporting segments on news programs, maybe we need a WeatherBunny(tm) avatar to spiel the forecast in a G-string and a big friendly grin. That might actually be worth point the ol' browser to a second time.

    Pardon my dinosaur sexism.

  • How do you know that she's white? Both she and Croft strike me as being "hyper-racial" or "non-=racial", sort of not quite white, but not really mixed race, either, or perhaps some of every race mixed with a lot of "raceless".
    I'm a little curious as to why they think it matters what her height is if she's only going to be a talking head. Perhaps they're planning a full-length version. When you click on the "who is she and what makes her tick" link, the page it takes you to reads a lot like a Playmate Profile.

    this sig file intentionally left blank

  • You have.. err.. stumbled onto a new and fabulous marketing gimmick. Asheron's Call, the game that is so good, you will crap in your favorite pants just to keep playing! Act now and get a free 5-pack of Depends! Lets just hope that the new virtual newscasters will filter this kind of story.
  • In the USA, perhaps. In Canada, you can't get away from ADSL and the @Home network. At prices that are the same as dialup+2nd line.

    Not much of a surprise, though. Canada seems to always have the lead on the USA when it comes to telecom. But I think some Euro countries are even further ahead (I seem to remember very high-speed BBS access in places like Finland?(Norway?) about a decade ago...)
  • Beats a cartoon parrot.
  • Definately a hot virtual babe. ;) Although I tend to shy away from bandwidth consumption, I might actually enjoy a broadcast now and again if I ever get off a modem connection to the net. (another story..., all together)

    Anyone need a sysadmin in the midwest? Requirements are a fast pipe, and wages. ;)

  • The japanese word for "idol" is usually written in katakana, one of japanese's two syllabic alphabets -- the one used to render foreign words, or sometimes to add emphasis to a word (the way we would use bold or italic characters). Unfortunately, I can't write katakana on Slashdot, but if you follow the usual conventions to write japanese using our alphabet, you would get 'A-I-DO-RU'. On the other hand, it really is pronounced "eye-doh-ru" -- again, with the "r" in the "ru" pronounced as a mix or "r" and "l"... e.g., they don't say "sayonala" nor "sayonara", but something in between.
  • When a large number of salary men in Japan were losing their jobs, some employed agencies to be a virtual workplace, so their family wouldn't know they'd been fired. Single men felt left out, so they were able to rent a virtual family to deceive using their virtual job agency... (appologies to Good News Week ;)

    Not really, but it makes you wonder how much of Japan is real.

  • whatever your little 3-D rendered heart could possibly desire
    Stuff the sex crap, I reckon a virtual "Bender" from Futurama would be the coolest.
    "I've never made anyone's life easier and you know it!"
  • Spam or no spam, a 56K connection is still a 56K connection. There are a lot more delivery methods available today with higher bandwidth, but I think it will still be a while before higher-speed access becomes the norm.
  • That woman can read news to me any time she wants. But, erm, can you tweak her to read other things as well? I have a few things from usenet I haven't gotten around to yet...

    -lx

  • Didn't mean to post anonymously. That was me.


  • Seriously, though, people have been putting forth the same "the machines will take all of the jobs! or at least the poor people's jobs, anyway" argument for about 200 years now. It hasn't happened

    First, the fact that it hasn't happened yet doesn't prove that it can't ever happen, any more than that proves that it will happen. I think you've demonstrated some room for optimism there (more optimism, to be specific, than I offered in my post), but I don't think you've proven anything.

    Second, there is a widening gap between the rich and the poor in the USA, and for the urban poor in particular things are getting increasingly ugly as time passes.

    Third, cultures have collapsed before because the sans-culottes (or descamisados or proletariat or whoever) got to a point where the majority of them simply had no way of getting a square meal.


    There are a huge number of assumptions implicit in those two sentences.

    The more the merrier! :) You're right, but I think some of them are at least somewhat justified, as follows:


    -things could get "that bad" for a lot of people

    See "sans-culottes" above; it's happened before in history. IMHO the burden of proof is on anyone who claims that it can't happen. This, of course, does not necessarily imply that it's happening right now, as we speak, in NYC.


    said "real bad"ness will make other people change their beliefs about things like freedom

    I didn't clarify that, but I'll stand behind it 100%, as soon as I get a chance to fill in the rest of the thought: A-hem. If/(when?) the proles (for lack of a better term) feel that they have nothing to gain by following the rules, they're going to stop following the rules in a big way. When that happens, the people who still have something to lose will be all in favor of draconian law-enforcement measures and a serious erosion of the rights of groups perceived as being poor and/or criminal. In general it's a valid observation about a state of affairs which does arise now and then in this world. If NYC is not now in that state, I should obviously not have mentioned it.


    New York is already "real bad", and is already a police state,

    Okay, then what is it? That's not sarcasm, I'm curious. The Giuliani fans I've spoken to (and read in the press) have claimed that crime in NYC was beyond endurance and that extreme measures were therefore necessary and justified. Life being as complicated as it is, there is no doubt more to be heard about the subject.


    and this meets with the approval of "freedom-loving affluent geeks"

    I may have been mistaking the views of noisy tough-on-crime Slashdotters with the views of a larger group of people. If so, I goofed. However, it's a very, very common phenomenon, geeks or no geeks.


    Hey, if you want, I can put you in touch with the NY libertarian mailing list

    By all means, I'd appreciate that very much.



  • What, just because it's "high tech" it's got to be fucking stupid? What a crock.

    Heh heh, look: I've already wasted more time on it than it's worth.

    Have the Right Wing Trolls weighed in yet on this one?



  • Who's going to buy the burgers? Who's going to buy our software? When all the burger flippers etc. are out of work, we can sell our nice shiny software to each other, but we're doing that already. With the burger flippers dropping out, you're talking about a shrinking economy. (Okay, now some libertarian will rear up and burn me at the stake for heretically questioning the Grace of the Holy Market :)


    the smart hackers/engineers/managers get a shitload of money . . .

    It'll be more complex than that. Actually, it is now: The stupid managers get an incredible amount of money (n), the smart ones get n/2, the webmonkeys get n/4, programmers get n/8, etc.


    and everyone else is reduced to serving burgers/help-desk/sales-droid.

    They have been already. What you started off talking about is a time when a bunch of Q3 bots serve your burger and the people who are now relegated to min-wage "service industry" jobs will look back on minimum-wage-no-benefits as a sort of lost paradise.

    When things get that bad for a large segment of the population, I have a feeling that all the freedom-loving affluent geeks of the world will get real fond of police states real quick. As they've done in NYC already.

  • On the one hand: This is potentially nice because it can be a pleasant interface to `personal assistant'-type software; a talking head that reminds you (in a friendly voice) about things you need to do, tries to predict your needs (electronic and otherwise) and acts as a data input source.

    While streaming text etc. may be more efficient, most of the tasks a personal assistant needs to accomplish do not require rapid information transmission, but if anything an increased sense of personalization.

    On the other hand: She searches around the web so that 'everyone's a journalist'? I thought that the point of a news service is that the data is collected by people that I trust to have common sense as to what is believable or not, and what is interesting or not. I simply do not believe that they have a computer capable of distinguishing such subtle layers of fact and fiction as is required to be a gateway between information sources and a news database.

    And if indeed they did have such a computer, that (as their four-color glossy website claims) has its own tastes and enjoys electronica etc... why does that make me think `Sharon Apple?'

    It seems like a potentially useful technology (real-time encoding of text into a talking head) being used in a potentially useless way. (Outputting the contents of a poorly-constructed news database)
  • Virtual Characters are nothing new. Only thing that is new is the marketing force behind it ;-).There has been several successful virtual characters so far (and many unsuccessful). One of the more successful ones was a virtual model for the Elite Modeling agency. Check it here [elite-modeling.com]. She could not speak, however. There are a lot of other virtual characters that can speak however. Check virtual friends by Haptek [haptek.com].
    Also, check out Virtual personalities (or verbots) by Virtual Personalities Inc. here [vperson.com].

    Those who know their computer graphics also must know Nadia Thallman and her virtual personalities (you can't forget virtual Merlyn Monroe) over at Miralabs. Microsoft also has "Agents" which act as virtual characters and personalities.

    --
    GroundAndPound.com [groundandpound.com] News and info for martial artists of all styles.
  • >> Think about it: you sign up to a site, and get a "relationship" with an idoru;

    Not to nitpick, but "idoru" is a William Gibson phrase. The actual term is "Idol", and is spelled "Idol", as it is an english word. In japanese, there is no strict "L" sound, so it's often pronounced "Eye-Doh-Rloo" by Japanese speakers.

    My guess is that Gibson spelled it phonetically to make the title seem exotic. Sort of the equivelent of naming your book "Pudd'nhead Wilson" (by Mark Twain). That does not mean that the proper spelling for a milk based dessert is "Pudd'n", and the proper spelling for a virtual celebrity is not "Idoru", it is "Idol".

    --
    Evan

  • That is an awesome idea! I had not thought of that ! Someone moderate Monte's idea up!
  • Smack it up, flip it, rub it down, oh know!

    I'd love this to be true right off the bat, but we all know this is just someone with the server to make an actual server behave like an actual server... not that that's not a real servver, but we should see something that better that that wank-ass crap. Great idea, but nothing so groundbreaking as deserving of a story here. Maybe if she were sitll running "Firefly"... I wish it hadn't been taken down...

    AI si good, but this is just a simple re-hash of tech that's been around for over 4 years.

    Let me be yet another whiner and say "we should have a new category for AI", but I want to think it's worthwhile now. We can all make us proud!

  • Instead of reading the headlines at the relatively fast rate that I can read text, instead I can have a pretty CGI puppet read it to me at a painfully slow rate. You have no idea how much this idea excites me.

    The point of computer UIs is *NOT* to exactly model the real world around us. (Look at Apple's QT4 Player to see how dumb this can be.) The point is to design interfaces that provide the best flow of information through our relatively limited and unmutable human senses.

    When designing a system, always design with the human user in mind. I can read news a hell of a lot faster than I can listen to it. Your average 30 minute TV newscast has less content than a single newspaper page.
  • Yeah I know, this seems like a really neat idea. I don't see why it would be such a waste of bandwidth. You'd just need a client application that can read out streams of text... The bandwidth wouldn't be the difficult part, it'd be getting the facial movements and the voice to sound smooth and lifelike. That'd be neat to have a chick reading slashdot headlines (or whatever) asking you if you wanted to visit that site now and stuff. Very cool!! All you need is a basic framework then you could put skins and stuff over it like you were saying, different voice predefines, etc. Of course it would have a scripting interface to perform just about sys admin task you can think of too!
    Shweet...
  • Better yet, can it top Max Headroom?
  • RealSpeak is at least partially based on a product called TruVoice, which was developed and bought from another telephony products company called Centigram. I've heard better speech engines (like AT&T's, which they unfortunately don't license), but the place where TruVoice and RealSpeak really shine are in their TTS engine, which understands things like numbers and abbreviations and how they're used. Try synthesizing "I went to visit Dr. Smith, my 2nd physician, on Smith Dr. at 12:30" and you'll see what I mean.

    TruVoice is available for Unix, but unfortunately RealSpeak isn't. I don't know if this has something to do with their relationship with Microsoft. I'd sure like to have a single-user license that I could spit things into.

  • You're on to something here - but why limit our options to just the look/feel/sound? Why limit our filters to just the kind of news we want to hear about?

    I want my personal digital newscaster to slant the news according to my desires. Example: Engage Rush Limbaugh slant and instead of "A new tax is proposed..." you get "The evil godless commie bastards are planning once again to take more of your hard earned work to spend on their pointless and useless social programs...".

    All kinds of slants could be possible. I'd like a Conspiracy slant - some algorthym that links seemingly disparate stories by way of some sinister "them" connection.

    Of course "random" slant should be available, just to (1) make things more interesting and (2) broaden the mind. Perhaps it would be a bad idea to change slants too often, a different slant on every story would give me a headache fast.
  • Perhaps this just may have a practical use. Not to techies, but isn't this the kind of thing that attracts newbies to computers? My grandmother, for example, bought her mac just because it came in nice colors. Maybe virtual reality characters like this could be applied to useful purposes, like helping newbies learn about computers. Since nobody reads popup windows anyway, maybe a human voice and shape would have more of an impact. For news? Well, maybe not so useful. But most of the software on my computer isn't absolutely essential either.
  • To me, this is pretty pointless.. I can see why you might use it for broadcast, like Dev Null on 'The Net', but on the internet it's pretty naff. Presumably they'll need to stream a voice-quality feed and either gesture information to a client-side app or send new images down as she talks. This will be much slower than just *reading* the news, so i doubt i'll be taking much interest. The only thing that might make it worthwhile is if someone hacked the system to make Ananova read the news completely naked. But being a virtual character, this isn't very exciting anyway. I do agree that a tux version would be neat. perhaps i could modify my existing tux model.. currently he only shoots a hole in bill gate's face but hey. http://www.spunk.co.nz/spunkezine/reanimator/
  • No one doubts the command line is king for certain TASKS. If you have a list of, say five tasks - write a document, send an email, print 2 other documents, create an image, and send another email - you can do EACH TASK faster from the command line than from a GUI. But the advantage to a GUI is that I can do all of those at once, limited only by my ability to multitask, keep the tasklist in the corner, and keep going.

    This fits with that sort of GUI. The problem with the intelligent agents is that they only work with massive intervention on the part of the user, which defeats the purpose of having one in the first place. If the users don't need to interact with the agent as much, there's less of a problem.

  • I think that traditional dolby surround used a common back channel, which would add up to three channels. There was a pretty simple phase-cancellation scheme for the encoding, which made it fairly independent, but because it was encoded into two channels, it would have to have the same dimension as those two channels.

    The time aspect of each speaker is independent. Think of plotting out the sound, like an oscilloscope. Each channel would have its own pressure-time graph.

    It's interesting to consider the effect of your dimensions of sound, as in the real world, we have a limit to the number of dimensions that can really be realized. We basically can consider three dimensions of space plus one of time plus one dimension of pressure at each point, which sums up to a limit of five dimensions to fully describe the sound in any given real-world space. The internal representation may have more dimensions than this, but as it's played, there's always going to be a five-dimensional limit. Most people don't place speakers overhead (though it would be cool if they did!), so there's about four dimensions available. A surround system will provide a limited range: more speakers will get you closer to full four-dimensional sound.

    Like I mentioned before, time is a sort of dimensional quantity, because it is independent. However, it is a little different than a classical dimension, because you can't quite treat a time-pressure system as a vector quantity. If you add the two, you get something meaningless, because sound decays (instantly in a vacuum).

    Time is pretty independent, but I'm not quite sure how it would best be treated.
  • Strictly speaking, dimension is a function of independence (find this in a Linear Algebra book). You can easily reason that each independent speaker is an independent dimension of sound. With a Physics book, these dimensions of sound can be broken down further into time and pressure, which constitutes two dimensions. So each speaker encodes two fundamental dimensions. There might be some debate here, because time doesn't quite behave like a normal dimension, but it is essentially independent.

    So, your stereo sound card and speakers constitute a four-dimensional system. A new big-name card with four channels actually provides four dimensions of sound, or eight physical dimensions. Don't tell anybody in advertising, as there's enough hype around 3-D whatever as it is!

    There exist methods for dealing with systems with non-integral dimension (eg. 1.7 dimensions). This sort of system arises when there is some amount of separation, but there is not true independence (eg. fractals). I'm treading on sparse knowledge for this part, but I suspect that some lossy compression techniques, probably those used in streaming, would reduce the independence between the two speakers, causing a non-rational number of dimensions for streamed stereo sound. Even single-channel lossy compression may limit the dimension by introducing time-amplitude dependencies. If anyone has the theoretical background to do better here, fill in, or render me false on this second paragraph.
  • I just tried it out and I thought it sounded pretty good. My first thought was "oh Wow, they've achieved MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour level humanity." ;-)

    And now some tone of voice to make it interesting... (on the Newshour, not the software)

    Crash
  • Well I know in Canada CAnet3 is up and running, and right now they don't know what to do with all the bandwidth it has. The National Film Board supposedly has a DVD on demand system where you can watch any of their movies over the web now.
  • First it was some journalist who likes Linux, now its that CSC has been cracked. Where are they going? Y2K bug? :)

    Mark Duell
  • An example: Eating dinner while catching up on what MY stocks did today

    I guess I've been reading over the breakfast table (and snacks :) for so long that I don't find that reading on the screen interrupts my consumption that much :)

    Or, spending time with your wife and/or children.

    Yeah, you can be sorta listening in to what's being said in the background while playing around (with either said wife or child[ren] :) Guess I'm not that good at multi-tasking - I like to concentrate on what I'm doing. About the closest I get to this is playing with Lego with my son while a video tape is running (eg: Toy Story, Babylon 5, Star Trek, etc - he's 2 years old and prefers space action secenes to the boring human bits - that's my boy! :)
  • It's not denying choice, it's choosing the guidance of a third party. You do it every time you consult a map rather than guess the route.

    Hmmmmmmmm - I see where you're coming from. Yes, there are options (eg: who makes the map) and yes, they can censor/distort (ever tried to match the directions of roads from a Thai road map to reality? :)

    I guess my problem with this view is that I see more people making decisions about important things in their lives based on the crap/hype/lies they're fed by TV than maps. To me, the news media has more control over people and events than a map.

    If you deny this choice, that makes you a hypocrite.

    I'm not going to deny anyone the choice of how they get their information (that's part of the joys of the freeworld, isn't it :) I'm pointing out my personal belief that a talking head on the Internet is a waste of the Internet's power/capabilities unless it has "smart agent" abilities to gather information from the entire 'net, etc.

    Those who are happy to consume and rely on the bullshit they are fed are welcome to it. If they wish to make their own decisions based on the information out there on the 'net (and yes, stacks of it is crap/lies/etc) then they're welcome to it.

    Thus, I'm allowed to rant on about my beliefs and you're allowed to put up your own additions to the discussion (be they critiques, extensions, raising points of view, etc). Imagine if all we had was what CNN, NBC, et al provided for us.

    Damn but I love the 'net :)
  • stiefvater sez: "If she's really animated, why not show more than one image?"

    That's what caught my eye. I've seen about a dozen images of this character on various sites and they are all identical . The promotional site has the same image and nothing else. No MPEG or QuickTime, not even a sound clip.

    I'd expect this thing is nothing more than a text-to-speech engine with a library of facial expressions and mouth movements for lip-synching. If they managed to make it even slightly better than laughable, I'll be impressed.

    SD

  • Am I correct in interpreting this as a virtual actor? If so, how realistic is it? Can it do better than the stilted tone in which my Power Mac speaks to me?
  • How can we possibly say that this is a waste of bandwidth? Any time there is a new opportunity to present current events that will be more accessible to disabled persons we should cheer. Although the blind won't get the chance to see this "virtual" news anchors' flaming blue hair, they will have an additional news resource available. We all benefit from being given choice as to how we would like our news delivered. Don't like it? Don't watch. I do however hope there is more content than sports scores...

    Byzandula
  • Looks like Max Headroom could become a reality... Does this mean that blipverts are next?

  • i would make it a talking block of cheese!

    imagine the possibilities! REALLY! TALKING CHEESE!! IT'S AMAZING!

    bye,
    -jimbo
  • maybe someday we can all have our own virtual personalities! chat rooms would kick ass!

    someone want to start work on it?

    bye,
    -jimbo
  • This beats the hell out of the little dog that runs around gathering news and stock updates. Can't wait to see the skins ;)
  • maybe someday we can all have our own virtual personalities! chat rooms would kick ass!

    And with a bit more work, it could even say all the things I say on-line, so I wouldn't have to log in at all. Then maybe I'd have time to get a life! :-)

  • Actually, research done at AT&T Labs has shown that a head helps with comprehension. Take a look here [att.com] for examples of what they've been doing with text to speech. Then check out the examples with a talking head. It seems a little easier to listen to the voice when there's a head associated.

    I often wonder why no one has done this before. the technology has been around for a while (there are just 16 different lip positions to re-create the entire English language). Just morph between them, and you've got realistic lip movement.

    I've been interested in this sort of technology for years, since I first got a speech box for my Atari 8-bit. It came with a little program that would simulate lips on the montor while it spoke. Very crude, but effective.

    The real question is what this will mean to current broadcast television. It should be possible to create text scripts that will take into account that my personal news will select different stories than yours, and write generic "bumper" text to chain stories together. This way, checking on my stocks on quote.yahoo.com becomes something that I do while eating dinner, sitting at the dinner table, instead of at the computer. This is a product for the set top, not the desktop.

  • If this is just a cheap way of eliminating the mighty overpaid news anchor, yea, I'll be disapointed. Yes, it will be nothing but eye candy. However, if it is something that will make news on the web a less "hands-on" system (ie: have to search for story, sit and read it, can't really do anything else while surfing), I'd buy it. There are some advantages to having a passive experience when consuming information. The biggest, by far, is that you can multitask. An example: Eating dinner while catching up on what MY stocks did today (who really cares about the latest Linux IPO if I didn't get in on it). Or, spending time with your wife and/or children. I could see some system similiar to the Tivio "thumbs up/thumbs down" system to decide if a story is of interest to you or not.

  • Sorry. It has been tried, and failed. McDonalds knows they can completly automate their kitchens and deliver sandwitches at an incredibly high margin, and better consistancy (what McDonalds is really about). However, in tests they found that customers want to see the bright smiling faces behind the steam trays. Somthing about helping HS kids learn about work, etc.

  • Howdyho!

    I actually wouldn't doubt that the quality of the voice will have a great effect on how popular the service becomes. It could get very annoying listening to a robotic sounding voice drone on all the time, and most people would probably just shut it off. Perhaps a few would turn off the sound and keep it around for the view, I won't deny it looks nice ;-)

    To actually get people to use this on a regular basis, I think they're going to need a smoother, more natural sounding text to speech engine than what is currently available. I wonder if the technology is ready for this...

    "Spring has sprung. Fall has fell. Winter's here, and it's colder than usual." -- Boing voice sample from Macintalk

    Super_Frosty wrote:
    > Am I correct in interpreting this as a virtual
    > actor? If so, how realistic is it? Can it do
    > better than the stilted tone in which my Power
    > Mac speaks to me?
  • This reminds me of the zdnet pieces featuring Spenser F. Katt's "pal", Tilde. Basically a 3D rendered mannequin with a mid-80's haircut and casual streetclothes ('cause standard newscaster's outfits are so conservative & intimidating), etc.

    What makes both Ananova and Tilde so scary are the fact that they're digital avatars based on Patrick Nagel's pinup work, often seen at your nearest shopping mall's framing gallery.
  • I'm sure it'd be possible to send the talking head a script:

    Pathetic 'slow news day item
    fake laugh

    Of course, these freaks will probably render the thing server-side and realvideo broadcast it.
  • Ooo, I can answer this one!

    Maybe she was programmed by men in the UK. That would explain the "racist" British news focus, too. Hmm...

    Besides, what do you care, it's just an interface that reads text, and this is a prototype. I'm sure that if the technology is successful, there will be Canadian men and Asian Aliens and whatever your little 3-D rendered heart could possibly desire.

    Me? I'm still rooting for the Cyc project.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
  • I've seen it spelled "idoru" and "aidoru" by various people other than Gibson. Anyway, if you say "idol", it means something entirely different, losing a level of nuance.
  • If you're going to make the interface look like a human (which is an impressive trick, given both the visual qualities of the human form and the repertoire of nonverbal signals available to humans), you may as well make it look like an attractive, aesthetically pleasing human.

    Of course, they could have made it androgynous (sort of like Desire in the Sandman comics), but then it'd be harder to suspend disbelief about it being a human being. How many genderless people do you meet every day?

    And a lot of techno-fetishists like looking at pictures of attractive women. It's almost as visually appealing as looking at real attractive women, though does not necessitate leaving one's terminal and finding some.
  • Max Headroom was actually a guy in a rubber suit, designed to look like a computer-rendered surface. The only computer graphics in the shot were the rotating cubelike background.
  • Yes, I already use Festival, as a plugin for the irssi IRC client. It works a treat.

    However, that covers sound only (obviously) and works at the phonetic level rather than with an audio stream, so it's not really related in any strong way to the Virtual Newscaster thread.

    MPEG 1 video with MP3 audio is unfortunately a long way off (possibly infinitely) because it's not an officially approved combination, and MPEG 2 with DD5.1, DTS, DDS or MPEG5.1 audio are unfortunately out of reach online for the next several years because of bandwidth constraints. Darn, I beamed down too soon.
  • I couldn't find any reference to the audio streaming technology that they intend to use for this, nor to the range of supported platforms.

    Maybe we'd better let them know right now that a world exists outside of Windows and Mac, and that it's thumbs down for closed clients and proprietary protocols and thumbs up for open standards.

    It would be disappointing to have to take PA to task for being technologically blinkered when their cool system is finally launched.
  • Doesn't it seem strange to anyone that a "personal news agent" would be patterned after a white, 5' 8", women. I wonder what her measurements are? Do you think they might be similar to the gravity defying barbie? Isn't this a little sexist, and racist? Does the user have the capibility to change or modify what type of character Ananova is? Can i choose a 6' man who wouldn't be frequenting the spa and getting ready for a spot of skiing?
    Why is it that the personalities that companies choose to represent data in the "Internet Century" are misogynistic male fantasies?
  • Intelligent agents are fine; it's nice to have something that'll fetch the news you want to read.

    What I don't understand is why I'd want to *see* a talking head. *Listen* to a computer, sure... but watch an animation bob about? The animation doesn't add content -- it'd just be a distraction! Might as well play tetris as watch a talking head.

    What would really be exciting is an intelligent agent that somehow could figure out what *else* one might be interested in... and not the obvious links, but the subtle, almost random sort of stuff.

    I read a dozen news sources daily. But it's memepool, mainly, that provides me access to truly weird sites that make me go "hmmm." :-)

    Speaking of which, how do *YOU* expand your interests, knowledge, news sources? Can't depend on C|Net, Wired and, I'm afraid, Slashdot to really give you a chance to find weird, wacky and wonderful shite. So what a person do to tap the web more widely?
  • If these guys have some decent technology to back up their rather slick marketing, that is.

    For instance, if they've really developed text-to-speech technology that can read the text fluently and well enough not to be concentrating on the voice's synthesized quality, that would be kind of nifty. Similarly, while I believe the technology has been around for a while, synchronized lip movement with speech would be impressive. Imagine what this kind of thing could do in adventure games!

    However, if the company has the technology to do this, why haven't they demonstrated it yet? Until I see some concrete evidence, I doubt there's terribly much behind the marketing waffle.

  • If I've got a screen in front of me, why not something like the front page of Slashdot? Voice is useful in a limited environment, but I only need a talking head if I'm interacting with it (visual cues for conversation negotion - I want to interrupt, I'm bored, that sounds interesting). In fact, I'd go as far to say that text is my preferred electronic communications method, if I have the 2 dimentions needed to use it (a screen). If I have no screen and am limited to something like an audio channel (1 dimension?), then I need a voice to read things to me. It doesn't need a face - put the CPU cycles to better use (D.Net fo example).

    (As for bandwidth - I don't stream, I don't support flash. If it doesn't fit down a 1Mb/s link I don't care for/about it.)

  • You're right, of course. I overlooked Time.

    BTW: What does Dolby Surround do to your dimensions? Also, how independant is the time aspect of each speaker?

    However, for the purposes of my example, I'm referring to a single audio channel - perhaps one of Ericsson's upcoming Bluetooth over-the-ear headsets. 1D + time. Just like a screen is 2D + time.

    As a separate note, I much prefer the Hacked Barney [geekchic.com] for Real World interaction...

  • The ability to summarise important events, as you've illustrated, is far more important than having an associated image or model. I'd be very interested in a package that could tell me the stuff above, in less time than it takes for me to find out myself. Ironically, first thing in the morning at work I have the most time to spare when my PC is starting up. Not much use to have a program on it that does this stuff then. Perhaps a 24/7 server could compile the info overnight and burst it down to my PC straight away...
  • I tried the demo, also using a section of your text. What was most interesting was not the quality of the speech - which was impressive - but the fact that I had to turn up my speakers significantly to hear it over my cow-orkers. Moreover, I received a phone call while it was speaking, so I had to turn the speakers down before answering the phone. When I'm reading text on the screen, an interruption does not require an immediate action before the interruption can be dealt with.

    If, on the other hand, the computer knew that the phone was ringing, and imediately muted it's sound, we're back to being semi-pratical in a work environment. I'll be giving TTS (and Voice Rec.) a(nother) good look when I get a Bluetooth headset running...

  • Kinda giving Lara Croft a run for her money, dontcha think?

    Kinda takes CBS's digital superimposition of their logo over NBC's in Times Square to a whole new level.. now it's the background, AND the newscaster!

    I think we'll be in trouble when she starts broadcasting "I can feel my mind going, Dave" and singing "Daisy."

    W
    -------------------
  • If you want decent speech sythesis for Linux, try the open sourced "Festival Speech Synthesis System" [ed.ac.uk] from Edinburgh University.

    You can get tarballs for source and binaries and last time I looked there was a Red Hat rpm available too.

    Festival can be used with a range of supplied voice patterns, accents and languages and is completely configurable. I particularly recommend the MBROLA voices. Not as smooth as the AT&T TTS example, but pretty close.

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • However, that covers sound only (obviously) and works at the phonetic level rather than with an audio stream, so it's not really related in any strong way to the Virtual Newscaster thread.

    Duh, sorry! I didn't read your post properly. You're really talking about the streaming protocol that the sound output is piped through.

    With regard to your point about MPEG1+MPEG3...I'm admittedly ignorant about the technical issues but since there are already open source encoders and decoders for both of these formats, surely they only need to be wrapped up with some form of synchronization "heartbeat" and we'd have a new open source streaming format.

    A well-publicized open source project to create a new streaming protocol out of these two existing standards would probably attract quite a bit of support. Admittedly it's not Quicktime4 but IMO MPEG video quality is quite good.

    It might even encourage Apple and Sorensen to let minority OS users get access to their Quicktime4 codec.

    I wonder exactly what the technical difficulties are. They must be substantial; to date, AFAIK, not one open source MPEG player has included support for a synchronised sound track.

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • I should have checked freshmeat before posting that. There are indeed quite a few open source MPEG players with audio now, even stereo. And there are libraries to support streaming too (even RTSP).

    So why *don't* we see more streaaming MPEG stereo material out there? Maybe it's just because they're not promoting it.

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • Can I get my own personal skins for her? Can I model her myself? Can I give her some modifications?
  • ... as it shifts the economic value from a presenter (probably chosen for the trusting character) to the creative developers. For a big name media company, this is good as it eliminates a high variable cost with risk of the star leaving your show to a fixed known quantity. Also the digital character can be infinitely customisable ranging from cool barbie characters to wise elders. I'd be very interested in their pricing structure (fixed cost / year? per appearance? per character?) as that will determine what segments of the industry that it has a chance to dominate.

    Basically, the future is not going to be nice, you can expect low-end white and pink (service) collar jobs to disappear under the influence of increasing computerisation as until the personality AIs catch up (has anyone invented a computer chat-back which implements humor?), there will be no unions, no strikes and no temper tantrums. So the smart hackers/engineers/managers get a shitload of money and everyone else is reduced to serving burgers/help-desk/sales-droid. It will be an interesting century as more economic disjunctions from increasing computerisation and technology shifts occurs.

    LL
  • ...to the holy grail of the porn industry: the virtual slut. Instant and perfect sexual frustration, facing a drop-dead gorgeous chick who acts like she wants you, and not being able to touch her.

    Nobody is going to find a chick that reads news to you very useful, but if they make her hot enough you'll try her out (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), won't you? At least I'm guessing a fair proportion of the population would.

    In all seriousness, I don't think anyone would give it a second look if it wasn't for the bored horndog factor.
  • I agree entirely.

    In fact, as I said in my original post, I don't think anyone would bother with it unless it looked like a hot chick.

    We're talking about a fundamentally useless, even counterproductive, program. It does nothing but slow down the rate at which you get news (and probably a very limited selection of news). Given that it has no utilitarian value, the value must be aesthetic.

    However, I wish they'd be a little more honest/clueful about their product's appeal. There are more aesthetically appealing things for a virtual babe to do than read news...
  • Because Geeks like fantasy women.

    Why else would lara croft be so popular
  • Hmm...does this mean we really will have a Max Headroom popping up and giving us news, instead of human newscasters at a fixed time?

    Jazilla.org - the Java Mozilla [sourceforge.net]
  • How long has the site actually been up and in this state?

    The server returns "Last-Modified: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 19:54:51 GMT" for the homepage, not that it means much since it could have been in this state for a while with a sentence or two added on Friday. The domain was registered on September 16, 1999, so I suspsect they haven't had enough time to develop much of anything other than the graphics on the site.
  • Nah.. it's not the standard male fantasy. She isn't nude (yet...)

    //rdj
  • I'm afraid that anyone who tried to "help" newbies with this kind of program would get it horribly wrong. Think Microsoft Bob 2000. *shudder*
    --
  • I actually did once see a videotape of something similar, only it had a more serious application.

    Lucent did the demo of research they were doing with advanced MPEG compression of human faces. IIRC, the idea is that there are a finite number of expressions the human face can have, and that one can achieve a high level of compression by transmitting the facial details once, then transmitting the change in expressions as the person talks.

    They showed a compressed/avatarized video of a woman talking about something, and it was pretty strange - sort of a creepy disembodied head that wanted to be human.

    And yes, I do belive that this is all supposed to be part of a future MPEG standard.

    I kind of missed the point - it seemed like a really extravagant length to go to for a questionable amount of compression. But then again I'm not much of a math guy.

    I hope I explained all that right.

    --

  • The voice is not quite convincing as belonging to an actual human being, but I still think it's a monumental achievement, especially considering the level of expressiveness it achieves with plain-text English (no hard-coded phonemes or stress codes). What's more, it's by far the most comprehensible and pleasant-sounding TTS engine I've ever encountered -- and, being a TTS nut, I've played with a lot of them, as far back as "Speech by Andy Maguire" on the IBM PC internal speaker and even S.A.M. on the Apple ][

    I stuck this into their demo of any text to speech. I think it's interesting how it expanded your TTS to "TextToSpeech" ... I wonder what other easter eggs exist there :-)
    ---
  • How about someone to comment on the /. effect while you wait, or to grumble allong with the poor choice of poll selections? Let me see, I'd like my personal assistant to send hate mail to various people that post 'Troll' and 'First Post' topics. Better yet, maybe they could beat us to submitting stories.

    And then *wham* a new thought hits me ... To let loose an informational deposit like this really makes the knowledge base in the /. community obsolete.

    Consider: If this thing lives up to its claims, it theoretically knows what stories are going on, checks for /. relevance, and then kicks off an email (short randomly generated title etc...) Now, when the discussion pops up on the article, *bam* it's also the first to post additional information, correct posters with incorrect knowledge, and otherwise run a discussion with itself...Now all we have left is 'First Post' and 'NATALIE PORTMAN BLAH BLAH BLAH' messages we can post.

    My suggestion, fight this. Fight this hard... What do I think is the best way to do so? A Nonsense generator like this [monash.edu.au] postmodern-generator. All that needs to be done is modify this so that it uses places in the news, people in the news, current political philosophy and then *boom* - the Digital assistant starts posting crap.

  • I'll probably get flamed for this, but do you really think people care about bandwith anymore? In the era of Shockwave Flash, streaming media, MP3, spam, etc., etc... I mean, just think about how much faster the internet would be if suddenly there was no more spam (impossible, yes, but think about it!) Or if every site didn't have some sort of flashy intro or be completely loaded down with videos and music...

    I mean, if we're gonna label this as wasted bandwith, at least label AOL the same way!
  • In a way, this IS the ultimate GUI.... it seems to me that it's the same way - think about the ammount of time that it takes for you to format a floppy disk through a gui, and then compare that to the nice, simple DOS command line. The downside to the GUI is clear - if you can type quick, you can get a heck of a lot more done in a shorter time on the command line.

    The advantage to a GUI on an OS is ease of use. But Ananova will just be delivering sports scores? How is this making anything better than text? Isn't this just a slightly more evil version of the office assistant? Not what I think I need to get my news.

    There is no sig.
  • Intelligent agents have been buzzwords for last ten years. In the final analysis, content will be king, or it will fall the way of PointCast.

    ---
    "And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold."
  • Quick, someone register AnanovaAccessories.com so we have somewhere to get her Christmas present.

  • Not a penguin (Score:3)

    by acb ( 2797 ) on Sunday January 16, 2000 @09:30PM (#1366404) Homepage
    GNUnanova will probably come with appearance themes. The most popular will look like a composite of Queen Amidala and one of the absurdly-endowed women from Heavy Metal comics, and there'll be a wide range of BAB3Z, ranging from Pamela Anderson knockoffs to Jenni-alikes for the downloading.

  • Re:Attractive. (Score:3)

    by PurpleBob ( 63566 ) on Sunday January 16, 2000 @09:52PM (#1366405)
    That'd be cool. Of course, I wouldn't want one of these unless it processed the information really well, but you never know.

    Vision of the future with Virtual News Tux:
    *Bob logs in*
    *Tux window pops up*
    A squawky but clear voice reads: "Hey, Bob. You have new mail, but it's mostly spam from that myfamily.com site that you hate and all your relatives love. Plus, your MUX went down again, so you have five e-mails asking why it went down, three from newbies asking how to log on, and one from the sysadmin apologizing for tripping over the power cord. There's a new article on Slashdot about the release of Mozilla M17, which you'd find on Freshmeat too. Your Karma went up a point. Whoops, there it goes, you just got moderated "Offtopic". Your comment on JonKatz's latest article got a reply, but 9.8% of it is swearwords so it's probably a troll. And the 2.4.8 Linux kernel is out. Come on, you know you want to upgrade."

    Other "skins" for it could include characters such as HAL. "There's nothing new, Bob. Would you like to play a game of chess? Bob? Bob, I'm so lonely..." *closes window* "My process is going. I can feel it..."
    Hmm, maybe not such a good idea.
    --

  • When Is It Usefull? (Score:3)

    by grantdh ( 72401 ) on Sunday January 16, 2000 @08:57PM (#1366406) Homepage Journal
    Talking Heads (the news anchors, not the group :) are the reason I left TV behind. I want to get my own info at my own pace.

    What scares me is that there are a shitload of people out there who just want their info shovel fed to them. They don't want freedom of choice, they want freedom from choice. They love the idea of the "Information Superhighway" where you travel to restricted locations, get force-fed censored information, pay your tolls and can get busted by the cops. They don't like the "Information Serenghetti" concept where they can go where they want, lurk & watch, pick & choose and occasionally get eaten by a lion/busted by a game-warden. It's too much like hard work.

    Now, along comes a talking head on the 'net. Just how interactive is she? (minds out of the gutters, folks! :)

    I mean, can you talk to her and tell her to go find information for you based on a set of parameters, having her do the virtual leg work? Can she be running for you 24/7 and provide you with all the information she's found whenever you stop by? Can she call you on the phone and tell you when something big & new happens?

    If not, then she's just another piece of eye candy. Style over substance. The obsession of the '90's lives on in the 2000's - why am I not surprised :)

    I didn't raise my Internet to be a glorified TV news caster....

  • This really amuses me (Score:3)

    by Tim Behrendsen ( 89573 ) on Sunday January 16, 2000 @07:11PM (#1366407)

    Normally I hate network news because the anchors annoy me so much. The idea that some $5 million/year blow-dried news anchor can be replaced by a simple machine is just too amusing.

    Can't you just picture Peter Jennings (or pick your favorite hair) reading this story and saying to himself, "Nahhh... this'll never catch on! I'm too important to the well-being of America. I do more than read the news: I represent the trust in the 4th branch of government!"

    I feel like I should hate this, but... I feel strangely attracted to this concept. I find myself thinking this is oddly cool.


    ---

  • Re:L&H RealSpeak (Score:3)

    by patrick_jones ( 95543 ) <azurlune@gmai l . c om> on Sunday January 16, 2000 @11:33PM (#1366408) Homepage
    The best TTS engine I've found is AT&T's Next Generation TTS [att.com]. The samples are amazing. Much better and so much more realistic than L&H's system. And they have developed a lip-synch system as well.
    If Ananova can do anything like this than I'm never watching CNN again :)

  • L&H RealSpeak (Score:3)

    by Spire ( 101081 ) on Sunday January 16, 2000 @08:35PM (#1366409)
    To actually get people to use this on a regular basis, I think they're going to need a smoother, more natural sounding text to speech engine than what is currently available. I wonder if the technology is ready for this...

    You might want to look into Lernout & Hauspie's [lhs.com] new text-to-speech engine, RealSpeak [lhs.com].

    First, listen to the pre-recorded samples [lhs.com] (in several languages!); then use the Web demo [lhs.com] to plug in your own text (I recommend a random article off a news site such as CNN [cnn.com]). Ignore the "30-word limit"; it's bogus. For best results, listen to it read an article that you haven't read, and don't read along. I think you'll be amazed by the quality.

    The voice is not quite convincing as belonging to an actual human being, but I still think it's a monumental achievement, especially considering the level of expressiveness it achieves with plain-text English (no hard-coded phonemes or stress codes). What's more, it's by far the most comprehensible and pleasant-sounding TTS engine I've ever encountered -- and, being a TTS nut, I've played with a lot of them, as far back as "Speech by Andy Maguire" on the IBM PC internal speaker and even S.A.M. on the Apple ][.

    No, I don't work for L&H, but I find their latest TTS engine exciting, and I plan to snap up a copy (as well as the SDK) as soon as it's released in the form of a mainstream commercial product. I can only hope that Ananova sounds as good as RealSpeak.

  • The killer application? (Score:4)

    by acb ( 2797 ) on Sunday January 16, 2000 @09:37PM (#1366410) Homepage
    Now there's an idea worthy of a huge IPO: a real virtual girlfriend service.

    Think about it: you sign up to a site, and get a "relationship" with an idoru; for the sake of example, let's say her name is Traci. For the subscription fee, she (actually, a random natural-language generator running off a knowledge base crosslinked to your relationship account) will send you email, telling you about her virtual life, asking about yours, and remembering enough to give the illusion of continuity. Once a year, she'll have a "birthday" (randomly chosen), at which you can buy her virtual presents (by credit card). Also add to this other relationship surrogate activities/expenditures.

    Something like this would probably really sell in Japan (and may in fact exist there). Then again, there they have parks where you can pay for the privilege of raking leaves, for that real close-to-nature experience denied to city-dwelling salarymen.

  • User preferences? (Score:5)

    by joshv ( 13017 ) on Sunday January 16, 2000 @07:21PM (#1366411)
    The article mentions that her delivery of the news items could be modified to suit user preferences.

    I can just see the options now:

    Sultry Voice: On
    Accent: [x]French []British []American
    Flirtation Coefficient: Min |----------O-| Max
    Startup Phrase: [ Hey there sexy, have I got some HOT news for you ]
    Shutdown Phrase: [ Mmmmm, ohhhh, mmmmmmmmm ]
    Lipstick Color: Hooker Red

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