The charm comes from limited budget and time. They didn't have infrastructure or technology to make shows as easily as we do today so they had to nail it the first time or risk being g late.
@@rabidbigdog From the 1880's through the 1970's typing was a specialized skill that women took classes for in high school and did as a career. The ordinary businessman didn't know how to type, merely dictating letters. Voice recognition and voice interaction was a way to make computers accessible to the masses. (Manual typewriters require both physical finger strength, and also lack of automatic correcting typewriters meant you had to have very good accuracy) Even in the 90's, people got overwhelmed with GUIs with words everywhere. I remember old people thinking they had to read every single thing on screen, not familiar with say a dialog box taking attention. We still have this stupid fascination today, with Alexa and Google Assistant and Siri, that doesn't make sense outside of specialized situations (basically driving).
@@rabidbigdog I collect sound toys and research the hardware. In early 1980th they made a talking version of almost everything (e.g. watches, alarm clocks, calculators, bathroom scales) not only for the blind, but as a luxury/novelty hitech gadget. Later it was considered annoying, so for a long time most cars or appliances didn't speak anymore. (But e.g. in a washing machine it would make sense if an unusual fault prevents it from working. E.g. "I get no water. Please open the water tap and check the hose." or "Unbalance. Please untangle your laundry and restart spindry.") I am only happy that my talking alarm clock (unlike Alexa) is not designed to spy the mankind.
@@straightpipediesel I agree, the technology has found a few niche applications, besides google/siri/alexa, such as phone banking, or any kind of large business or government phone line system for consumers that presents menus and asks the user to say what they want in order to connect them to the relevant department etc... Also, a friend of mine has a law firm and they still use speech to text software to convert all their smart phone dictated information.
You watch this and you take what they say as accurate and objective. Even if they from time to time fall way off in their predictions. Even when they have guests from companies showing off their products, you know they are trying to get to the truth. Which quite interestingly enough, is given by the guests, without lying or over exaggeration. You try to watch tech programs today, youtube or TV, and you just know it, it's nothing but part of the marketing department of companies.
I guess you missed the episode in 1983 where Alan Shugart from Seagate did nothing but defend his own products in his "predictions". Same with Morrow defending his 5.25" drive in a laptop when the entire industry had already moved on to 3.5". And there are many more examples like that. Don't idealize the past, it doesn't get you anywhere.
Marketing knows how to sell. While I'd love to hear an engineer talk in-depth about their new product, it won't cause the masses to get excited to buy it. You need a marketer to do that. Which is unfortunate, because now nobody actually talks about the technical aspects. It's all quick, flashy marketing for the ADHD crowd. Presenters today can barely let someone complete an entire sentence, let alone two, without cutting in with some flashy graphic or something.
imagine if they brought it back modernized the floppy drive and floppy disc to have more capacity it would be bought up more for nostalgia then anything else
I wish Alexa had an option to sound like a vintage speech synth. Having the voice of Gorf or Wizard of Wor answering my questions would make it would seem more like I'm living in the future. 😄
yeah well it's shocking at how fast the voice recognition works on such old slow hardware of that time when you think about it now days the hardware power is seriously overkill compared to that
@@raven4k998they did it on a slow 286 or 386 SINGLE computer with one core one thread and only a couple mhz processor with less than a million transistors. Today, Alexa, Siri, Google , ALL use MASSIVE servers and THOUSANDS OF SERVERS to process speech. You couldn’t fit the code of Alexa or Siri for example in anything less than MANY MANY TERABYTES
I really like the intro music. And MicroFocus' definition of "visual computing" is pretty amusing (though understanding in the context of COBOL programming in 1984). 14:27 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epson_HX-20 "The Epson HX-20 (also known as the HC-20) was the first "true" laptop computer."
@@raven4k998 it's just prerecorded speech. this thing they are demo'ing has very little permutations going on so they could put together some phrases and digitize it for replay. would never fly for a real speech synthesis system.
AIO inc. Hmm. Appletalk was standard on 68030 and 68040 Macs in the early 1990s. PCs didn't include built in speech synthesis till Windows 95, both platforms though didn't include speech recognition until OS X adapted Siri and Cortana was taken to the Desktop PC. Neither of which are perfect at what they do.
Human speech is an area where computers haven't really progressed at the level of computing generally. Even the text to speech features on new computers aren't that good. Android and IOS are getting much better though.
Yeah, there are plenty of computer programs that read books aloud for blind people (I don't mean audiobooks but programs that read out epub, pdf, plain text etc) and they all still sound pretty bad.
@@jr2904 What do you mean by older? I'm in my 50s and they don't fool me. If anything, I would think younger people are easier to fool because they've heard it all their lives.
@@PhoenixNL72-DEGA- Many blind people playback text2speech at 5x speech that sounds like completely gibber to untrained novices, but permits them to read at the same speed like seeing people.
WaybackTECH I was just about to comment: It's sad that voice recognition doesn't work even a tiny bit better in 2015...OTOH, the device I typically use it with does fit in my pocket, so there's that, I guess. Personally, I think they had someone in the back w/ a mic ;)
statikreg It`s staggering too because with all the data mining Google has, from Google voice, etc etc, it`s still kinda bad if we think about it. Not the best yet.
Design flaw: "Buy a thousand shares of Votan" Should have echoed back a SYNTHESIZED version of Ron's speech, not simply a recording of it! Oops! After viewing the rest of the presentation, that WAS a synthesized version of his voice!
David Perkins My suspicion, especially given the major difference in quality between the Call Text product and the Vodan demo, is that maybe the latter was all simply pre-recorded samples instead of actual computer voice synthesis.
In the last segment the voice seemed too realistic for 1984. And the back and forth conversation and processing seemed way too fast. I got the feeling the interaction was staged, like there as a guy in the back room pretending to be the computer voice.
@@JBuchmann pre-recorded discrete samples. they had a bunch of that in the 80s which was basically just an analog sound track being activated by some digital logic circuitry. very limited use but the practice of it sounded futuristic and amazing. only thing is, the entire way this is done has zero application to the methods needed in real digital synthesis.
1984 I was at the World of Wheels (Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane was there!!) and there was a kiosk with this system in it. you could type anything in it and it would do just as it did here. me, being silly, typed in a bunch of random letters and see how it sounded. well, it sounded just like the phonemes those letters represented -- a bunch of random sounds... :p
I love my microcomputer and watching The Computer Chronicles. If the shows could exude strength, they would keep my fingers and right thumb on the keyboard.
"Would you like to play a game?" "I can't do that dave." "Come with me if you want live." "Your all going to die down here." "Danger!!!Will Robinson, Danger!!!" A dream come true or a nightmare waiting to happen you decide.
These Speech Synthesis programs are specific language dependent, so when the English language version is installed than it will only speak in the English language out loud. I remember that when the phone company had debuted a speech synthesis feature saying current time it was ended just a little bit later when the US government chose to break up AT&T from its baby Bell phone companies.
Taking something that you could just read ... and turning it into a thing that you have to access over a voice call is the most-boomer tech imaginable.
and why would there be so many Herb fans ? well Herb knows what he is talking about. not pressing a button that automates centuries of research in man hours then laughing about how easy it is. big difference. Herb can do it in his head and presents himself well. Not mentioning his actual work.
Still a big challenge today and still extremely annoying in all cases applied. Speech simply can not be isolated from situational feeling/emotion and instant intuition.
this guy's voice is the reason why early speech synthesizers all sound that way :P he kinda speaks like one himself lol. according to him that sounds 'natural' lol.
also he asked how it works. not 'a general description of what it does' lol :P the expected answer would be something like 'we put the pcm samples in some rom and hook an offset table to the start of each one then somehow link that to ascii values or combinations thereof' :P aaand then we simply ram that through a resistor array at the back of it to generate the voltages' :P or 'something like that' :P would be 'how it works' not 'what it does' lol.
have to admit that voice synthesis and recognition is one of the poorest areas of computer development. graphics, sound, processing power, network speeds, all beyond the wildest dreams of where we are compared to 1984 but only incremental gains in voice
jfcash84 If that was the case I’d have thought they’d advertise the supplemental textbook (this was aired on PBS based on my knowledge). Based on a Google search it appears Herb Lechner wrote the book to accompany the show yet I can’t find any record of the text itself. EDIT: This made me dig deeper and here’s an Amazon link for the book 📖 www.amazon.com/Chronicles-Wadsworth-continuing-education-professional/dp/0534033962
I believe he was a professor and the shows were for a college course he developed and taught then coordinated the curriculum with Stuart. That's my guess anyway. Computer Chronicles must have been required viewing, which wouldn't bother me at all.
