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"My feeling is that the chance of our surviving into the twenty-first century as working civilization is less than fifty percent but greater than zero."
- Isaac Asimov
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| Sound-Transposing Machine | ||
| A device that scans a printed page and reads it out loud. |
In this fascinating story, a child is lost within his own world. However, he makes symbols. Does he have his own secret language? And how can you hear it?
A great scientist is put to the test.
| "I have done it," he said simply, "and you do not owe me a cent... In a month's time, tired people will be placing pages of a book in their machine and hear it read to them..."
Then an entire page of the lad's typing was run through the sound-transposing machine, purposely slowed so that the sounds could be differentiated. |
| From The Lost Language,
by David H. Keller. Published by Teck Publications in 1934 Additional resources -
|
Note the additional feature of being able to vary the speed at which the device reads the text.
Machine translation of foreign language was not theorized until the late 1940's, and was not tried until the late 1950's. As anyone who has ever used an OCR (optical character recognition) system in combination with a program that translates text into speech knows, we're still working on it.
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Tech news articles related to The Lost Language
Tech news articles related to works by David H. Keller
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- K-NFB Portable Text To Speech
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| Burner Generates Temporary Phone Numbers |
| HushMe Bluetooth Device Reinvents The Hush-A-Phone |
| Ubiquiti FrontRow Camera Records Your Life |
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'Merton... placed the electrodes of the sleep-inducer on his forehead.'
'... we can descend and live down there at one of those year-round aquatic resorts.'
'...she would have to be coaxed by another series of pats into a circular orbit.'
'The sleek, tapered space shuttle lay immobile upon the private landing field...'
Yes, people of the future, robots will dress you.
