March 31, 2005
Dovetailing tools together
OK, this amused me enough I had to share. My fraternity brother Nivi just lost his voice, so he went and purchased a nice-sounding text-to-speech voice for his Mac at Cepstral and piped its output into Skype with Soundflower. Voilà — instant TTS phone.
I remember David Ross once told a story about how the Model T Ford (nicknamed the "Tin Lizzy") was adapted to all sorts of things unexpected things, from winching wagons to pumping water. The key was the car's simplicity: it was just a motor on wheels, and it didn't take an expert to that motor for something besides driving. It's a lesson that keeps repeating itself: tools made up of simple, powerful components with straightforward interfaces for linking the pieces together find their own new uses.
Posted by bug to Media Technology at March 31, 2005 5:25 PM | TrackBackI spoke to the virtual Nivi on the phone the other day. It just wasn't the same. I am thinking about buying one of those voices, though. We use our Mac to announce the caller ID of phone calls in our home, and the voices that come with the Mac are last decade's technology.
Posted by: Rawhide at April 1, 2005 7:01 PM