Well no bears this time, and no pictures yet either. We had a fun time at our annual first camping of the year, and Sarah had a blast. The weather was perfect. Everything went great. Josh was a great big brother showing Sarah the ropes and introducing her to everyone. One of the highlights was playing tag with Josh, his friend Quit and my friends Matt and Deidra.
But for some reason I just did not relax. I didn’t get to spend as much time with friends or just vegging on the beach as I wanted, and I really have no one to blame but myself. Part of the problem is that I just could not shut my brain off. Last year I got a notebook, and it ended up being my ‘PyCon’ notebook. This year, I just didn’t seem to have time, oddly enough. Code freeze at work was Friday and that, I am sure, didn’t help. The official fork will most likely be this upcoming Friday.
I have had no time to work on any of my python projects, and it is driving me crazy. There are so many fantastic things happening with django-survey, and Pinax is picking up steam, I need to put the old PyCon ‘08 stuff into archival mode, and start up ‘09. There is some very very interesting stuff going on with the DFW Python group that I want to help out on as well. There are so many fantastic things being worked on right now by incredible people, and I feel a down right claustrophobic not being able to do anything myself. I only been able to attend one Boston Python Meetup so far this year!
It looks like I will be in Montanna the first week of July this year (my anual pre-PyCon-Tech kickoff-kickoff). Barring any project ‘issues‘ I hope to get my act together then (with respect to PyCon software for 2009). If there are any pythonistas in the Missoula area, please send me an e-mail! For now I guess I should get back to unpacking the car.
Well the Python lab seemed to go ell last night, and I had a lot of fun doing it again, even if the turnout was… well not what I had hoped. I think the people who did attend enjoyed it enough. Most people have come back to talk to me about it today. One person asked if I would be doing it again tonight, but alas, not.
I saw some of the most fantastic talks today. I could talk about those, but that is not what I will do.
Well it has been a 10+ year wait for some and a ~6 year wait for me, but there is finally a Dragon Naturally SpeakingTV Commercial! It’s just being shown on some basic Cable channels (CNN, Discovery, History, Fox ***). There are not that many spots purchased, but it’s something! I remember being told back in 98 that we would have a commercial for VoiceXpress, never to see it happen. I was more than a little jaded when it was announced internally a year ago, that it was finally going to happen. It is a little surreal to see something that I have worked on (that is not Open Source) hawked on TV. Now I am am just hoping we can get a GOOD commercial for the product, I would settle for merely not bad at this point.
My god, I wish I had something good to say about this piece of advertisement. Lets decompose.
1. The product
They somehow took a product that is fun to watch people use, and has a very cool, minimal, embedded interface, and made it a chore to watch. Worse yet, they misrepresented it’s capabilities. It works better, faster, and easier than is portrayed. It is a continuous speech recognizer, why is that kid talking discreetly (one word at a time, and slowly?). It looked like he was using Kurzweil Voice or Dragon Dictate from 1995! Even the executive is talking as if he is reading a cue card (which is most likely the truth of it). This software is used by stenographers in court rooms. The fastest speaker can be recognized. I thought the most precious thing in a commercial was time? Why is there so much filler?
They never actually show the software clearly. The dragon bar is just a yellow blurry blob on the screen. Granted you can hide the bar, but the end result is, the system appears to be very slow and unresponsive. Even the cute typing text in the add is a misrepresentation. We do not send one letter at a time to the screen; that would be annoying after 2 seconds, not to mention slow. At least the womans use of the product is a little closer to reality. Oh and yes, you have full command and control over your PC ala Star Trek, but by saying ‘listen to me’ and ’stop listening’ instead of ‘computer’; though you would never get that impression.
2. The script
Wow. I mean wow. When it comes to emerging trends, technology, and what the ‘hip’ kids are doing, our upper management is fairly on top of things. They also understand the products they sell at a level I have not seen at any other company. I guess the same can not be said of our hired marketing firm (or whoever produced this thing)! The things wrong with the script (from both a technical and substantive perspective):
The woman writing an e-mail: Even my Mom knows what a signature is and how to set her mail program to include it automatically. Who in their right mind would use a voice macro to do that? There are much better ways to show off macro’s. And form filling would be better for multiple signatures. That is a killer feature!
The history report. I know adults think teenage boys are stupid and cannot write a decent report, but this poor actor must have been choking back bile when he saw this script.
The IM interaction. This is just abysmal: ‘Are you in’? Every IM client from hour 0 has had the ‘away’ feature, so yes, he is ‘in’, you know that already. I guess ‘in’ is the hip new lingo all the kids are using these days.
The executive. This is how a teenage boy pretending to be an executive talks.
3. The acting
All I can say is I really hope we got a good deal here. In some cases I think it is the material. There is not much you can do to make it palatable, so why waste the effort. It is a cut rate commercial for a few basic cable channels after all. What is interesting is we have many commercials for our vendors and resellers, and the acting there is top notch. You can find most of those on youtube, or on our website (though this is a demo, not a commercial).
4. The Direction and Cinematography
Ok, its a commercial. The sets were believable. the lighting spot on, the sound perfect, and the basic camera work was good. But please show the product. You never got a good look at what was going on, on the machine. The product is supposed to be the star of the commercial. Here it appears to be a character off screen being talked about.
What would I have done?
Well I would do a rip off of the HP ‘talking hands’ commercials. This was actually my idea back in 1997 when I first started working with speech. Show the apps swapping around like you do in real life, only by voice. Show the real speed of the product. show the people, but not their heads. Show their feet propped up on the desk in front of them. Put the product first, and make it interesting. Have them standing there, and the transparent screen in front doing all the cool things they do in the HP commercials, only they have their hands behind their back. Show people really using the product, not selling it. I guess that is why I am an engineer and not in marketing.
Additional Notes:
No you do not need to speak punctuation. There is auto-punctuation, but before it is accurate the system needs to have been used for a number of hours to collect enough statistics on how you use punctuation and inflection. Having DNS inspect past e-mails and documents can help, but gathering the inflection data is the key part. For that reason it is turned off be default. More research and data will fix that.
No you do not need to spend hours or even minutes training the system. You can use it right out of the box, and it will get better with time. To be honest the learning curve is more on the user end, than on the software end. Talking to a computer is just like any new means of input, like cell phone SMS tapping, or pen tablet. It takes time to become comfortable with it, but not as much time as other input devices.
