5 ms·

The Verbalizer – An open source board to use with Google's Voice Search

22 points by kirtan 15y ago

lkrubner 15y ago
This event was impressively organized, even though the software was very alpha and untested and hard to make work. I posted some photos here: http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/micro-controllers-soder-pizza-and-beer http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/micro-controllers-sod... I should also add, the headline here on Hacker News is misleading. Yes, the demo connects the Verbalizer to Google Search, but you can do a hell of a lot else with it. That's the whole point. You could argue that it's basically a glorified microphone, but one that's got a bunch of points of control added to it. The 2 women sitting across from us connected a heat sensor to to the Verbalizer, so they started getting heat data from it and feeding it into their laptop. They didn't have time to do anything cool with that input, but clearly, this is an area that is wide open for experimentation. By the way, all of the equipment was given to us for free. Even the sodering iron was given to us for free. I guess Google was throwing around some marketing dollars. This is the most impressive free event I've been to in months.
MikeCapone 15y ago
I don't want to sound like a guy from the 1990s, but it's nice to see so many women interested in hacking. Looks like a great event, kudos to the organisers.
- lkrubner 15y ago
  That struck me as well. The organizers were 5 guys and 1 woman, so if you look at the photos it looks like the room is majority male. However, of the attendees, there were 9 men and 9 women. I was curious about that. We were all, in a sense, handpicked to be at this event -- after we signed up they sent us an email every day saying "Are you sure you still want to be in, please reply by 10 PM or you are kicked out." (I'm paraphrasing, they were slightly more diplomatic.) We failed to reply on Sunday night so we got kicked out. Then on Monday they told us there was an opening (someone else failed to reply and got kicked out). So we got back in. But the point is, everyone who was there was, in a sense, picked. So I'm curious if the organizers deliberately engineered the 50/50 gender split. The whole thing was videotaped, and we had to sign a release form for the video as soon as we walked in.
tocomment 15y ago
I don't get it. How do the google search results get back to the board? Is the board parsing the search results? Also, surely this violates Googe's TOS.
- joezydeco 15y ago
  The article said nothing about search results going back to the board.
  - tocomment 15y ago
    oh, so what's the point? It's basically a bluetooth microphone?
    - joezydeco 15y ago
      Yup. With a widget on the PC side to take the waves and shove them into Google.
zmanian 15y ago
This is a perfect example of why we need the Chromium developers to come to consensus on an acceptable UI for programmatic triggering of the HTML5 speech API. In this implementation, they have to actually take over the computers mouse and have it press the microphone Icon to capture input.

22 points by kirtan 15y ago

This event was impressively organized, even though the software was very alpha and untested and hard to make work. I posted some photos here: http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/micro-controllers-soder-pizza-and-beer http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/micro-controllers-sod... I should also add, the headline here on Hacker News is misleading. Yes, the demo connects the Verbalizer to Google Search, but you can do a hell of a lot else with it. That's the whole point. You could argue that it's basically a glorified microphone, but one that's got a bunch of points of control added to it. The 2 women sitting across from us connected a heat sensor to to the Verbalizer, so they started getting heat data from it and feeding it into their laptop. They didn't have time to do anything cool with that input, but clearly, this is an area that is wide open for experimentation. By the way, all of the equipment was given to us for free. Even the sodering iron was given to us for free. I guess Google was throwing around some marketing dollars. This is the most impressive free event I've been to in months.

MikeCapone 15y ago

I don't want to sound like a guy from the 1990s, but it's nice to see so many women interested in hacking. Looks like a great event, kudos to the organisers.

lkrubner 15y ago
That struck me as well. The organizers were 5 guys and 1 woman, so if you look at the photos it looks like the room is majority male. However, of the attendees, there were 9 men and 9 women. I was curious about that. We were all, in a sense, handpicked to be at this event -- after we signed up they sent us an email every day saying "Are you sure you still want to be in, please reply by 10 PM or you are kicked out." (I'm paraphrasing, they were slightly more diplomatic.) We failed to reply on Sunday night so we got kicked out. Then on Monday they told us there was an opening (someone else failed to reply and got kicked out). So we got back in. But the point is, everyone who was there was, in a sense, picked. So I'm curious if the organizers deliberately engineered the 50/50 gender split. The whole thing was videotaped, and we had to sign a release form for the video as soon as we walked in.

tocomment 15y ago

I don't get it. How do the google search results get back to the board? Is the board parsing the search results? Also, surely this violates Googe's TOS.

joezydeco 15y ago
The article said nothing about search results going back to the board.
- tocomment 15y ago
  oh, so what's the point? It's basically a bluetooth microphone?
  - joezydeco 15y ago
    Yup. With a widget on the PC side to take the waves and shove them into Google.

zmanian 15y ago

This is a perfect example of why we need the Chromium developers to come to consensus on an acceptable UI for programmatic triggering of the HTML5 speech API. In this implementation, they have to actually take over the computers mouse and have it press the microphone Icon to capture input.