In Douglas Adams’ humorous sci-fi novel series Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy a special kind of fish is mentioned – the Babel Fish. When inserted into the ear, it translates any spoken language to whichever language the listener understands. It is a very nifty device, and now Google seeks to create something similar.
According to Times Online, Google is developing a speech-to-speech automated translator for Android phones. It’s essentially a combination of two of Google’s existing technologies; its online universal translator service, Google Translate, and its voice recognition system.
Google plans to make its Babel Fish a lot like a human translator; the software would analyze chunks of speech, and translating them in their entirety, rather than translating word for word. Franz Och, Google’s head of translation services, claims the technology could go live in a couple of years. “Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on. If you look at the progress in machine translation and corresponding advances in voice recognition, there has been huge progress recently,” he says.
Anyone who’s used Google Translate knows that translations aren’t (and probably never will be) perfect, but they’re very helpful when you can’t understand a word of some foreign language. However, Google’s voice recognition also has issues of its own, and I fear that these two combined would produce a very high amount of errors. The Times also mentions the issue of different accents, a problem that Google plans to solve by making the software gradually learn the speaking habits of the phone’s owner.
Despite the big issues Google has to overcome to make this technology useful, if anyone can pull it off, Google can. The idea of being able to call someone who doesn’t speak your language, and have the conversation translated almost instantly, well, that’s one of those inventions that made Google the company it is today.
Google is Working on Speech-to-Speech Translation for Android
40 DreamScene Movies & NonUltimate DreamScene
Windows DreamScene is a utility that allows videos and other optimized animations to be used as desktop wallpapers. It is one of the Windows Ultimate Extras. Prior to its official announcement, DreamScene was rumored to be in creation under the names Motion Desktop and Borealis. After several months of testing, the final version was released on September 25, 2007
Rendered content included with DreamScene (such as an animated realization of the Windows Aurora background) was produced by Stardock Design, while photographic content was provided by the Discovery Channel. Third-party video content in MPEG or WMV format may also be used.
One of the purported advantages of DreamScene over previous methods of desktop animation is that it makes use of the GPU for display instead of the CPU, leaving the latter free to perform user tasks.[4] To what extent this is achieved is not specified. When a full-screen program is run, such as a game or any window that is maximized, the video will automatically stop since the video will not be seen and will use less GPU and CPU. The video can also be stopped manually. Content encoders need to strive for a balance between compression and file size; decompression requires the CPU, but larger files take up more memory and may cause the disk to be accessed more frequently.
Running a video in the background would have a significant effect on the battery life of mobile computers, whether or not it were rendered by the GPU, so DreamScene may display a static background when a computer is running on batteries. The software relies heavily on the Desktop Window Manager (or DWM, part of Windows Aero).
Some of the biggest differences between Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate have to do with encryption, security, and data backups. But there are also a few useless but fun visual effects that you don't get in cheaper versions of Vista. For example, DreamScene is only available in Vista Ultimate.
Pretty nice looking, right? But probably not worth dropping the money on a Vista upgrade. Well, now you don't have to. If you're willing to much around with your windows system files, you can install a patched version of DreamScene i.e NonUltimate Dreamscene that will let you run animated backgrounds on any version of Windows Vista, even Vista Basic.
So here you have got 40 assorted dreamscene videos/movies and NonUltimate Dreamscene.
From RS.com (6parts)
Part1 Part2 Part3
Part4 Part5 Part6
full+free