Word: spokenness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...snags: Where was Capital Cities going to get the money to buy the network? To help solve that problem, Murphy called in a longtime friend, Warren Buffett, 54, a soft-spoken and secretive investor from Omaha. Buffett, who owns 41% of Berkshire Hathaway, a diversified investment firm, is an old hand at deals involving communications companies, but he acknowledges his friend's expertise too. As he told TIME last week, "Murph needs an adviser like Carl Lewis needs a tail wind." Berkshire Hathaway currently owns 13% of < the Washington Post Co., 8% of Affiliated Publications, whose flagship property...
Automatic speech recognition, the technology that enables computers to respond to spoken commands, is old hat to fictional electronic brains like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but still a primitive art in the real world. Computers are not yet discerning enough to cope with the ambiguities of spoken language or with a wide range of accents and tonal qualities. Making sense out of human discourse, says Dataquest Analyst Kenneth Lim, "is quite possibly the most difficult thing for a computer to do, other than actually thinking...
...voice-recognition systems in most of these devices can be compared to a human searching through a key ring for duplicate pairs of keys; by aligning two keys at a time, he can quickly locate any pairs that have identical sawtooth patterns. In the electronic equivalent, a spoken command is transformed into a varying electrical current that can be represented by a wave with a characteristic set of peaks and troughs. This wave form (see diagram) is converted into a template, a pattern of zeros and ones that the computer can digest and store. By prerecording a number...
...commercial possibilities of the advanced systems seem boundless. Kurzweil Applied Intelligence in Waltham, Mass., for example, is testing an automatic typewriter that will print out any of 10,000 spoken words. That development will come none too soon for James Ickes, 33, of Redondo Beach, Calif., who was paralyzed from the neck down in a football accident 14 years ago. Now he can use a voiceactivated computer to dial his telephone, operate a ham radio and compose his mail. He has even started writing his autobiography, dictating it one letter at a time. Cumbersome as this procedure is, Ickes...
After the verdict, Roth charged that his bishop was "supporting corporate attacks." Bishop May contends, however, that many Lutheran ministers around the U.S. have joined protest marches or spoken out against social injustice without interference from the church. Says May: "There's no problem because they are not dividing and destroying their parishes...