Archive for Software
This started out to be a post about writing a computer version of a word game, but ended up focusing mostly on computerized word lists. Wordle got me thinking about a vaguely related (but not the same) word game called Fives that I learned as a kid. I wrote about Fives in a 1997 Words […]
“The Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary is an open-source machine-readable pronunciation dictionary for North American English that contains over 134,000 words and their pronunciations.” One could use this data for speech recognition and speech synthesis, as the page suggests. One could also, presumably, use it to automatically create a rhyming dictionary, which is not a […]
I was playing a word game (Capitals, an iOS app that’s apparently no longer available), and I got to wondering how one would go about using a computer to find all the words that you can make with a given set of letters. I wouldn’t use such a program for playing a game. But I […]
I’ve written here in the past about speech recognition (column DD, and brief notes on Google Voice), but I haven’t written much about speech synthesis, except for a post about song synthesis and an aside in column iii. So I’m pleased to note that Google has made some remarkable improvements in text-to-speech lately. For example, […]
It appears that in all these years, I’ve never yet written about turning text upside-down. Note: It’s possible that some parts of this column won’t be readable, depending on the font in which you’re reading it. Apologies if so. I think that if you view this column on the Words & Stuff site, in a […]
Janelle Shane, who has trained neural nets to generate entertainingly semi-plausible names for all sorts of things (Pokémon, Star Wars characters, etc), posted a new list about a month ago: bird names. But this time, most of the names weren’t much weirder than real names of bird species. Still, I enjoyed them. A few I […]
Researchers at U. Penn have created software that generates typos. Give it a phrase, and it will generate a list of variants on that phrase, featuring things like missing letters,...
I got curious about why HAL 9000 sings “Daisy” (actual song title: “Daisy Bell) in 2001. It turns out that it's because Arthur C. Clarke saw a 1962 Bell Labs...
Just saw this in a blog entry at alternet: One of the lawyers handling the case for the defendants (that is, defending the constitutionality of Prop. sent us a note...
Back in the late '90s, I wrote a column on computer speech recognition. The state of the art has progressed somewhat since then. One of the new uses for the...