Gemini Articles of Interest
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Technology and Free Software
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Thinking about moving on
I am now 7 years in my current job (Head of IT in a small company), a job that i really liked for the most time, but in recent months there are creeping ever more thoughts in my mind that it is turning sour. So, i am currently evaluation my options in which way to move on.
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Old phone morning project
We've had a family mobile plan with Verizon for a number of years now. The service wasn't bad, but the price kept creeping up no matter what we did. It always amazes me how companies these days are so willing to punish their long time customers with higher rates while offering a much better package if you should "switch" from another service. Seems like a really backwards way of doing business to me. Anyway, due to my SO being a first responder we qualified for an AT&T special plan that will prioritize her phone if the lines are crowded. The best part is that it's a pretty good savings, and not just an introductory rate. We should be able to save money for years to come, so we switched.
One of the annoying things about the switch is that we were unable to carry our current phones over due to being carrier locked. I've always hated this practice. It's a totally non-subtle way of locking you into your current carrier. Well, FU Verizon, because even after putting four new phones on a payment plan we're still saving $50 a month. But I hate to see the old hardware, which still has plenty of life left in it, just sitting in a drawer. Her phone, and my daughter's, were new enough to trade in. That leaves mine and my son's. I'll be trying to think of something cool to do with his, but this morning I put mine to use with a nice simple project.
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Internet/Gemini
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Failed attempt at free multilingual TTS by abusing IPA
My recent job have been developing a very fast TTS system for our internal use. I can't share too many details about it because NDA. But I do want to share some findings while messing with our system. - My boss is ok with me sharing these findings. We are looking to open source it soon anyway. It's not a breakthrough or anything. Just well engineered and fast - To make our model perform better, our system first converts the input text into the International Phonetic Alphabet. That is then fed into the speech synthesis model. Me with some basic phonetics training thought to myself, IPA is supposed to be universal. Can I, in principle, train a model in English. Then force it to speak Esperanto by feeding it the corresponding IPA? More far fetch, can I make it speak Japanese or Chinese?
Kinda. But not really.
The International Phonetic Alphabet is a writing system that allows us to write down the sounds of human languages. It's not a language itself. It records the sound of the spoken language itself. For example, the sentence "I would just like to interject for a moment" first get converts into `aɪ wʊd dʒˈʌst lˈaɪk tʊ ˌɪntɚdʒˈɛkt fɚɹə mˈoʊmənt`. The IPA letters look weird. But if you squint hard enough, you can almost see how it spells out the pronunciation.
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