It is rare in a lifetime to realize, in real time and in the moment, that a meme is not only fading away, but is withering on the dying vine of communication. The TDD/TTY — Telecommunication Device for the Deaf/Teletypewriter — dies a little more each day in the Deaf Community.
There is no greater fun than playing around with Text-to-Speech on the AT&T Labs website.
Text-to-Speech has great advantages for aiding the communication needs of the disabled: Those without voice are given one; those who cannot see can hear text. Text-to-Speech can also be used in the everyday world of the ordinary consumer. I have visited the AT&T Labs website to have phrases like “Janna is calling!” made into .WAV files.
At 10:45am Eastern time today this blog – and all my sites – stopped responding. We were dead in the water again and Media Temple, our web hosting service located in California, was down as well.
A half an hour later the electricity went down here in Jersey City.
I was wholly sitting in the dark.
The first thing you think — after being trained every day in fear and loathing by the Department of Homeland Security — is:
Yesterday I tossed over the Samsung a900 I’ve had since December in favor of the even more provocative Cingular/at&t PDA BlackBerry 8700c phone and here’s why: While I love the sleek and small feel of the Samsung a900, I live via email and the a900 is more of a multimedia phone than a text device.
My lovely wife Janna is also big on email and she needs to track three email accounts while she’s out in the world away from her computer 12 hours a day. We both need a phone with a keyboard because the a900’s T9 predictive text isn’t cutting it as a vibrant writing tool.
You must be logged in to post a comment.