Innovation of the Week: Windows Vista Speech Recognition
Posted by: meikah | 2 March 2007 | 3:28 am
I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about Bill Gates’s latest baby, the Windows Vista. Among the many interesting things about it is the speech recognition feature.
Indeed to me and as the tag line of Vista, “the “Wow” starts now.” The strength of Windows is its being user friendly, but this one takes the easy-does-it phenomenon to the next level. You can now tell your computer what to do without probably lifting a finger.
David Pogue talks about Speech Recognition of Windows Vista on his blog, Pogue’s Post, at New York Times Technology.
Speech Recognition lets you not only control your PC by voice–open programs, click buttons, click Web links, and so on–but also dictate text, a heck of a lot faster than you can type.
The first time you open Speech Recognition, you arrive at a very slick, very impressive full-screen tutorial/introduction, featuring a 20-something model in a white gauzy room that appears to be heaven.
Click your way through the screens. Along the way, you’re shown the basics: how to dictate and how to operate buttons, menus, windows, programs, and so on.
Filed under: Software/Technology, Entertainment, Innovation Update, Communication, Bill Gates, David Pogue
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Innovation of the Week: “Computer writes its own fairytale”
Posted by: meikah | 16 February 2007 | 12:42 am
Our innovation feature today is quite interesting. It combines literary and technology skills.
Pérez y Pérez, a computer scientist at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City, developed a program called MEXICA. The program generates original stories by assigning computerised representations to emotions and tensions between characters. Not only that the program can even edit the story and rewrite it if the system “thinks” the storyline is not plausible. Whoa! 
This is how it works:
A story may begin with something as basic as, “The enemy wounded the knight. The princess cured the knight. The knight killed the enemy. The knight rewarded the princess. The end.”
At this point, the computer analyses the story for coherence and ‘interestingness’. The program views a story as interesting when tension levels increase and fall throughout the piece.
If the program finds that the story is boring or incoherent in places, it will replace or insert atoms until a version is deemed satisfactory.
The program reads characters as variables and assigns a numerical value, between -3 and +3, to emotional connections that are defined as either amorous or non-amorous.
The numerical value is equivalent to the degree of emotion, with -3 being intense hate and +3 being intense love.
The program also understands story tension, such as linking the word ‘wounded’ with tension. This too is assigned a numerical value.
Once these clusters of emotional links and tensions are established, the program begins an ‘engagement-reflection cycle’.
Basically this involves searching a database of story actions and other happenings, called ‘atoms’, and determines the best match for the characters’ contexts for that moment.
The process repeats itself again and again until the system can no longer make any matches.
At this point, the computer analyses the story for coherence and ‘interestingness’. The program views a story as interesting when tension levels increase and fall throughout the piece.
If the program finds that the story is boring or incoherent in places, it will replace or insert atoms until a version is deemed satisfactory.
I would be interested to see a complete story written by this program. Is this the answer to literary writers who are in a stump? What about those literary student writers? Professors better watch out!
Source:
ABC Online, Innovation & Technology Section, “Computer writes its own fairytale”
Filed under: Innovation Update, Communication
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Six Sigma Reference Feature: Six Sigma Communications @ infomap.com
Posted by: meikah | 5 February 2007 | 9:36 pm
During the Best of Six Sigma Practices seminar, I envied the three companies that shared their Six Sigma journey. It was quite obvious that they had addressed the success factors to begin with. What are these? They had the leadership, they had management support, they had people to train for Six Sigma and go into Six Sigma projects, and they had allocated a portion of their budget to do it.
How could they go wrong? From the open forum discussion, I learned that to sustain the enthusiasm and ensure the Control phase of the DMAIC, there must the right motivation and the timely communication. Reports are made accessible by everyone in the organization, and I’m guessing these reports are in the language that everyone can easily understand.
So, for today’s Six Sigma reference feature, I’m sharing with you a very useful article on “Six Sigma Communications: The Missing Link in Your Six Sigma Strategy?”
Written by Doug Gorman for Information Mapping, the article discusses how Six Sigma projects gone pffft because of miscommunication. I like this part:
Adding Six Sigma to the Communication Mix
Six Sigma initiatives will require you to significantly increase the quality and quantity of communication within your organization. But let’s face it, most organizations are already struggling with communications that are unfocused and difficult to read, with buried key points in endless lines of irrelevant information. The number of poorly written e-mail messages, reports, and proposals that come across their desks each day already overburdens managers. And workers already have difficulty interpreting all of the complicated policies, processes and procedures they are supposed to follow. Adding Six Sigma ideas, reports, proposals, solutions, project updates, and process changes to the mix will only add to the problem–unless they are presented in a clear, effective way that highlights key points and allows readers to quickly access and understand the information they need.
Adopting organization-wide communication standards, methods, and protocols, and adding communication skills training to the Six Sigma curriculum will help Six Sigma teams communicate and sell their ideas, plans, and solutions internally, will make life easier for overburdened managers, and will substantially increase a project’s likelihood of success.
Source:
Information Mapping, “Six Sigma Communications: The Missing Link in Your Six Sigma Strategy?”
