Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Contrarian Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pcyhuang who wrote (560)	10/25/2006 12:14:47 AM
From: pcyhuang	Respond to of 4080

MOT -- World's first natural-sounding talking dictionary in a cellphone? Full Story: online.wsj.com Motorola Inc. faced a size problem when it wanted to put the world's first natural-sounding talking dictionary into its cellphones. The company quickly realized there wasn't the space. The problem: most cellphones still have a relatively small memory, and while ordinary text files -- contacts, calendars, SMS text messages -- don't take up much space, voice recordings do. Somehow Huang Jian-Cheng, director of Motorola's China Research Center, and his team had to find a way of compressing the voice recordings of pronunciations of some 100,000 words in Mandarin, Cantonese and English into a file not much bigger than two megabytes -- about half the size of a single MP3 song file. One approach would have been to include a speech synthesizer -- basically a robot reading the words -- but they quickly decided that would be too, well, robotic. Instead, they sliced up each word into segments. When this is usually done each word is broken down into its constituent parts -- called phonemes -- but the team realized that wasted space and didn't sound so good. So instead where possible they carved them up into as large slices as possible: "tion" at the end of an English word rather than "ti" and "on," for example. "The longer, the higher the quality," says Mr. Huang. pcyhuang