Re: OT: Help! (MP3 questions) pt 2 of 2

James Jolley <jrjolley@xxxxxx> wrote:

(Rowland McDonnell) said:

James Jolley <jrjolley@xxxxxx> wrote:

(Rowland McDonnell) said:
[snip]

I know someone who is in that industry and I find
that the tech is very fussy and irritating generally.

There's a poster here who seems to find speech-to-text invaluable - if
very fussy and irritating and unreliable (to the point of crashing the
entire computer at times). I suspect it might be a major pain to deal
with if you're not sighted - with eyes on the job, training the voice
recognition software is bound to be quicker, because it's so much faster
to spot the mistakes in the first place.
That's one part of it. For me, the idea of actually having profiles,
training the thing seems like a lot of arsing about.

Profiles?
When you start using Dragon as an example, you have to create a user
profile. This profile improves over time as the recognition software
understands your voice better.

Ah - righto. Sounds ideal to me.

[snip]

The only reason
I use punctuation announcement is when I'm working with Inform 7, a
system for writing interactive fiction. It's needed then.

Do I want to know what interactive fiction is?
Text adventures.

So why not say so? Text adventures aren't any sort of fiction in my
experience - they're irritating battles against the user input parser.
Many works of Interactive Fiction are hardly adventures in the literal
sense. Many now are more story-driven.

Hmm... I can't see how that would work. I've never met an interface to
that sort of thing which wasn't irritatingly impossible to get on with.
The idea of trying to work through a story that way - well, what story
would /I/ experience? One of profound annoyance and pointlessness, at a
guess.

I find all of them pretty much impossible to solve because I normally
can't work out how to tell the computer what it is I want to do.
Natural language parser my arse. And some of the things you have to do
to make progress in all the text adventure games I've tried are - well,
just plain silly (i.e., how the hell was anyone supposed to guess you
had to do /that/?). <shrug> I'm not a fan in general, let's put it
like that.
I can see that. I've always been interested in aspects of new media and
stuff so IF does come under that because it's a form of literature
combined with game.

I suspect if I checked out this stuff, I'd not agree that it classed as
`literature' or even `game'...

But enough speculation: go on, I'm talking crap about this stuff 'cos
I've never looked at the modern varieties. Could you give me a link so
I can take a look at something in that line?

Inform7 is a language for writing your own, based on
natural language. Think Cobol like but designed for games.

So it's horribly clunky and obsolete, then? btw, you mean `designed for
text adventure games', surely? Hardly going to be a lot of use for
designing a first person 3D shooter game if it's meant for text
adventures, is it?
Depends. Inform 7 can hardly be called clunky either. It has it's
detracters naturally, but the natural language aspects make it rather
easy to create complex environments.

Yeah, every time in the past I've heard such claims about a new `natural
language parser' input for anything like that, I've been intrigued and
then - not disappointed, because I'm not expecting much - but, hmm,
annoyed at the constant deception involved in suggesting that the input
parser's anything like `as advertised' - at least from my point of view
as a user.

It's a DSL
affair.

Digital subscriber loop?

Domain Specific Language

Hmm - never come across that phrase before. I can't say I like the idea
as presented in the Wikipaedia article on the subject - at least in some
details.

[snip]

Interesting. I have Vo set to 400 WPM in many cases,

I can't see any way to set a particular speed in words per minute. Do
you have third party controls, or what?
See the VO utility.

Righto. I've tried setting the `rate' to 100. The noise that comes out
at that rate is just unintelligible noise.

How does the `rate set to unitless number 100' I've got selected
compared to the specific 400 WPM speed you've got set?
Because I have asked the developers how the wpm is calculated. We had
to work with them when testing.

Yes, but how does the `rate set to unitless number 100' I've got
selected compare to the specific 400 WPM speed you've got set?

All I can hear at `speed 100' is noise.

[snip]

Will there? Short of reading Braille and walking with a white stick
(etc), and that only because blind people get more practice, I can't
think of anything that losing your eyes would make you *better* at in
general.
Perhaps surviving? Many sighted people rely on there external view of
the world.

<puzzled> Most of the data I receive about the external world is
visual, as is the case with anyone who's got working eyes that are open.

That's the point of eyes and the human visual system. However, if you
don't use a bunch of other senses, you can't operate well. For example,
you'd better have a working sense of balance, functioning ears are dead
useful to keep yourself alive walking around cities in particular
(traffic!), and so on.

Many sighted people don't seem to understand where they are
when the lights are out for instance.

Yes, of course, that's because eyes are so damned good at keeping you
oriented, and because artificial lighting is pretty much ubiquitous for
any modern city dweller.

So of course blind people are mostly better at getting around when the
lights are out - but some sighted people have learnt to do better than
blind when it's dark-but-not-like-in-a-cave 'cos they can use all the
tricks that blind person can use, plus their eyes (give a human eye a
packet of 10 photons and it can detect it, apparently - a packet that
big is just above the noise threshold of the human photon detection
system, apparently. See in the dark animals can only do better by using
reflective retinas and IR detectors in the retina and so on.)

Point it, it's not an ability granted a person on losing their sight:
it's a skill that is learnable by anyone, and being blind only makes the
need to develop that skill a pressing one. It does not give you any
ability - just a need.

My partner can't manage very well
in the dark.

Naturally.

I also think that blind people develope a better sense of memory for
procedures, hense all you're comments regarding VO not working. I can
tell you it does work.

<puzzled> I can't see any connection at all between `sense memory for
procedures' and my experience of Voice Over. I tried it. The
behaviour I saw was confusing and inconsistent.

Since I had read no instructions on how to use Voice Over, I had no idea
how to operate it beyond `cmd-5' and `shift'.

I can also tell you that I know the keyboard
commands as you should expect.

<puzzled> Of course you do. I learn keyboard commands when I have to.
When I do not, I rely on on-the-fly visual prompts, which I can see on
menus and things with my eyes. It's a little slower than remembering
things, but more convenient to get started than having to learn all the
damned key combos.

I know that there are a *few* blind people who have got good at
navigating by sonar, which skill can be taught. But the skill can be
taught to sighted people too. There's nothing I can think of that blind
people are inherently quicker and better at than sighted people due to
their disability.
I don't think it's disability itself that makes blind people slightly
more aware of things. It's the fact that we have no choice.

That's how it seems to me. For example, when I learnt Braille as a
child, of course I knew the only reason for using Braille is to read
with your fingertips - but that was so *SLOW* and I had no patience at
all. I learnt to read Braille by eye very readily (you need get the
lighting right or it's not quite so easy), so I read a few things for
practice and thought `Well, ink on paper is easier, at least I've got
some evidence that these dotty bits of card really are covered in
writing and it's not a hoax, can I be bothered to learn Braille
properly? Nah.'

If I were blind, I would not have made that decision, would I?

[snip]

Any time he's ill-informed that I've noticed, it's because he's said so
and has asked an expert to explain things. I've not noticed that he
presents himself as an expert as such - mostly he comes across to me as
someone who knows a bit and wants to find out more, even when he's
haranguing people.
Perhaps, to me, he comes over an arrogant tosser but there we are. He
might be nicy nicy, but he's clueless on so many levels.

Do you have any examples of Peter White's cluelessness?

What I like about him is that he does not pretend to know things that he
does not know, and that puts him in a good position when it comes to
finding out things from people.

Working in other modes, he does seem to have all the information he
needs at his fingertips, and I suspect that a lot of it's supplied by
BBC researchers, as is commonplace.

He thinks he's an expert and patronises
his listeners.

I think you must be listening to a different Peter White. The one I
listen to typically comes across as an interested amateur seeking
enlightenment most of the time, and - well, I've never felt patronised
by him and I've listened to him a lot.
He shouldn't be "an interested amature",

Why not? `Interested amateur' describes most of the listenership with
respect to that which they are listening to, and in my experience, R4
programmes are usually more interesting if the presenter comes across as
an interested amateur. Those who pretend to be experts tend turn out
smugly irritating and produce programmes that are less interesting and
less informative than the other type.

Peter Day's World of Business is an excellent example - he's clued up
about business *in general*, but he's always an `interested amateur'
when it comes to asking anyone about the details of what they do. He is
the radio presenter; they are the experts. And that is how it should
be, surely?

[btw, You've been reading too many subject header lines:

It's `amateur' (for the person), or `armature' (for the device).]

he's supposed to be aware of
what the hell he's discussing.

Hang on a bit, you criticise him for appearing to know more than he
does, and now you criticise him when I point out that he doesn't do that
and does in fact take a more humble line?

How is that sensible?

If you want someone with encyclopaedic knowlege of absolutely everything
in the world so that they can discuss any subject with absolutely
anyone, you're going to have a long wait.

If you want a decent radio presenter who can pick up new ideas and new
topics well enough to ask a real expert some useful questions, then you
have to hunt but not very far. The BBC has quite a few people like -
the Peters White and Day are both two of my favourites. And,
annoyingly, so is Martha Carney. Annoyingly? Yeah, I always found her
really really irritating on Womans' Hour, but I reckon she's ace on the
lunchtime news.

The guy generally is a waste of time

What makes you say that? I find him to be the *only* worthwhile
presenter on `You and Yours'.

and
in touch is regarded by many blind people as "out of touch" because of
it's reluctance to branch out.

`Many blind people' - i.e., you, yes? Pardon my scepticism, but almost
every time I've come across claims like that, the `many X people' turn
out to be an evidence-free allegation made about an unidentifiable
group.

Yes he is irritatingly smug, but I get the idea that's only because he
thinks that he's got everything completely sorted out in his own life -
enjoyable career, loving family who won't kill him by way of punishment
for his sense of humour, good home, all that jazz.
Sense of humour? him?

Erm, yes, he's got an appalling line in really painful humour. He
doens't seem able to stop himself coming out with really terrible cracks
and I for one think that the only reason he's not been killed due to the
poor quality of his jokes is that he's relying on people not doing that
sort of thing to blind men, which is unfair - i.e., exploiting our
natural sense of charity towards those less fortunate (etc., etc) in
order to perpetrate the atrocities against society that he gets away
with when he decides to throw a quip into the mix.

I just don't go for his presenting style,

Obviously. No-one says you have to.

the show
should be pan disability anyway.

No, that was `Does he take sugar' and it was dropped years ago. It
makes no sense to me to have one programme to cover all disabilities -
it'd just ensure inadequate coverage of everything except those few
areas the programme had a bias in favour of, which would be annoying.
Not if it's marketed properly and produced right.

Eh? Marketing has nothing to do with it. And I don't see how anything
like that could be produced well enough to give a decent coverage of
everything. *EVERY* time I've met an organization that was supposed to
cover a full large field, it turns out that actually it doesn't, it's
concentrating on a few areas to the exclusion of lots which should not
be excluded.

The field of `disability' is not monolithic and is very very broad. But
of course blindness is one of the first things that people think of when
thinking of `disability', so *YOUR* special interest would be one of the
few that'd be covered, to the exclusion of the special interests of lots
of other disabled types.

How are the special needs of blind people sensibly handled in a forum
that also deals with (for example) brittle bone disease or dyslexia or
epilepsy or multiple amputees? Wheelchair users vs. the colour blind?
Where do you fit in the discussion on the morality of deaf parents
failing to permit their children to learn how to speak?

<shrug> Seems to me that `disability issues' are too broad to fit into
one programme.

I reckon the different aspects of living need dealing with differently -
the fancy new tech *here*, the social issues *there*, the medical
developments in another place. And not in a ghetto either, integrated
into the mainstream programming.

After all, Radio 4 runs different programmes for all the other different
aspects of living - Peter Day's World in Business is possibly the most
wide-ranging of the lot, but even that leaves out some aspects of the
world. Not much on religious doctrine, for example.

20 minutes a week? I'd have an hour a
week but focus on all disability matters.

Peter White appears on You and Yours quite often. He's the only You and
Yours presenter that I can listen to for more than five minutes without
wishing to visit violence upon his person.
That's good but I'd be the other way

What? You can stand to listen to Liz Barclay *at all*? I can't. Three
seconds of her voice is enough to have me screaming for the `off'
switch.

Rowland.

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