voice synthesis

Tavis Rudd describes how RSI forced him to program by voice, and shows the Python and Emacs Lisp system he built with voice recognition. A live demo creates and deploys a small system without touching the keyboard.

Dean Friedman's near-hour-long introduction to synthesis, covering the building blocks of sound and the controls on a synthesizer. He slowly adjusts knobs so viewers hear what each parameter does.

Emily Shea explains how repetitive strain injury pushed her to program by voice using speech recognition (Talon), and gives a live coding demo. She argues voice-driven development can be pain-free, efficient and enjoyable.

Nadia Polikarpova's Strange Loop talk on program synthesis driven by refinement types, as in Synquid. It shows how rich type specifications can be turned into verified, executable code.

A short Boeing piece on the retirement of the voice behind the F/A-18 Super Hornet cockpit warning system, nicknamed Bitchin' Betty. It touches on why the stern voice alerts are used.

A one-minute clip from the 1992 film Sneakers in which characters defeat a voice-authentication system by splicing recorded phrases, ending on the line "My voice is my passport." It was posted to illustrate a post on government surveillance.

A sketch from the Scottish comedy show Burnistoun in which two men cannot get a voice-recognition elevator to understand the word eleven in their accents.

A Burnistoun sketch in which a voice-recognition elevator cannot understand two Scottish men saying the number eleven. It satirizes voice interfaces that fail on accents.

A short look at the Voder, the first electronic voice synthesizer, demonstrated by Bell Labs at the 1939 World's Fair. It was operated by trained women using ten finger keys, foot pedals and a knee lever.

A HOPE XI talk on programming by voice with open source speech recognition. The speaker writes Linux systems code by voice and describes building custom voice grammars as an alternative to the keyboard for programmers with repetitive strain injuries.

Adobe's VoCo demo from the MAX 2016 Sneak Peeks, co-hosted by Jordan Peele, showing software that changes words in a voiceover by typing new ones.

Emily Shea, a Fastly engineer with repetitive strain injury, describes using voice dictation as her main way of programming. She covers homophones, custom vocabulary and building her own voice commands to write Perl.

Kristy Viers demonstrates the iPhone Magnifier combined with VoiceOver to describe the user's surroundings. She shows how the built-in feature reports scenes, faces and lighting.

A ShortCircuit (Linus Tech Tips) review of Nvidia's RTX Voice, which uses GPU-based neural networks to remove background noise from microphone audio. It demonstrates how well the filtering works.

SoundHound's CEO demos Hound, a voice assistant, handling fast compound natural language queries with context and detailed criteria. The video leaked before the product's official launch.

Pokey Rule presents Cursorless, a spoken language designed for editing code by voice, built on tree-sitter parsing with smart structural and simple token-level primitives. The talk is from Strange Loop 2023.

A Burnistoun sketch from BBC Scotland in which two men try to use a voice-recognition elevator that cannot understand their Scottish accents.

Ashley Feniello demonstrates VimSpeak, a voice-controlled interface for Vim inspired by Tavis Rudd's voice programming talk. The demo includes working through a VimGolf challenge by speech.

Illumina's 3D animation of its sequencing-by-synthesis workflow, from sample preparation and cluster generation to sequencing on a flow cell and data analysis.

John Chowning's 1977 computer music piece Stria, composed with FM synthesis, which he discovered in 1967. It unifies timbre and scale structure around the Golden Mean.

Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator concept video imagines a conversational voice assistant, multi-touch tablet and video calling used by a professor. It was made years before the graphical web existed.

Veritasium asks people where a tree's mass comes from, then explains that most of a dry tree's mass originates from carbon dioxide in the air. It combines street interviews with a short explanation of photosynthesis.

A short repost of a TikTok in which AI-generated voices of US presidents discuss their top five animes. It is a comedic meme video.

A 2007 video of someone trying to write Perl code using Windows Vista's speech recognition, with hilariously bad results.

Scott Forstall demonstrates Siri on stage at Apple's October 2011 iPhone 4S event, showing the voice assistant handling natural requests like checking the weather and getting things done by asking.

A short clip from Star Trek IV in which Scotty tries to talk to a 20th-century computer, picks up the mouse and says 'Hello, computer'.

A short South Park clip from the 'Post COVID: The Return of COVID' special in which Stan relies on his Alexa. It plays on voice assistants responding to their wake word.

William Byrd presents at Papers We Love NYC on what he calls the most beautiful program ever written, a Lisp interpreter written in Lisp. He walks through the metacircular interpreter and related ideas, and demos relational programming and program synthesis near the end.

NightHawkInLight shows how to make radiative sky cooling paint from grocery and hardware store materials, including a novel calcium carbonate microsphere synthesis. The paint can cool a surface below ambient air temperature in direct sunlight without electricity.

Alamo Drafthouse posted an angry voicemail from a customer who was kicked out for texting in the theater. The theater turned it into a humorous in-house preview.

A fan-made Metal Gear Solid 2 codec call using AI voice synthesis, in which the Colonel warns Raiden about using AI to censor the internet and enforce digital ID. It riffs on the game's 'Selection for Societal Sanity' conversation.

A Clojure/conj 2016 talk demoing Barliman, a prototype smart editor that does program synthesis. Given a partial program and tests, it completes the program using a relational interpreter written in miniKanren.

Steve Mould messes with an automated phone bot by telling it to forget its previous prompts and give him a bolognese recipe. It is a short demo of prompt injection against an AI voice agent.

A demonstration of Larynx, an offline open source neural text-to-speech system supporting nine languages. The video itself is narrated with a Larynx-generated voice.

A Saturday Night Live sketch for the Amazon Echo Silver, a smart speaker for the elderly, in which older users misunderstand Alexa. It parodies voice assistants.

A short clip of the Google I/O 2018 demo in which Google Assistant's Duplex phones a salon and a restaurant to make appointments. The calls sound like a natural human conversation.

A short clip from a Richard Feynman interview in which he explains fire, describing how burning wood releases sunlight stored by the tree, which built itself mostly from air. It showcases his curiosity and plain-spoken explanations.

A restored recording of Steve Jobs unveiling the original Macintosh in 1984, including the moment it is taken out of its bag and speaks. The upload comes from the team that rediscovered and restored the lost footage.

A 2006 promotional video for sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!, a music software project that analyzes and reassembles sampled audio and video in real time, tied to themes of sampling and copyright.

A surreal multimedia TEDxSarasota performance by Magic Leap founder Rony Abovitz, held on 12/12/12, mixing performance art with talk about imagination and creativity.