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"In WWII, they had a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. I think the modern equivalent of that is that there are no jaded, bored people in the high-tech industry, in the land of really good hardcore geeks."
- Neal Stephenson
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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. |
| Technovelgy 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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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Lost Language
More Ideas
and Technology by David H. Keller
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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| Huawei Pura X Folding Phattie Phone |
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| Will Whales Be Our First Contact? |
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'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
