The cacophony
grew louder and more vexing as he neared the computer lab.
Charging into the room he found Ivy sitting cross-legged on the
floor and holding a joint to her lips. Her enraptured smile
wavered when she registered Peter's expression.
Two other young people, both boys, were also in the room, both
seemingly oblivious to Peter's arrival. One of the boys held a
microphone with a thin cable that ran into a small black box,
which was in turn attached to a Joey. The computer and a color
monitor rested on a table in the center of the room, which was
littered with beer cans, bottles, and junk food packages. On the
monitor was a bright yellow smiley face, and as the boy spoke
into the microphone the smiley face became animated and
responded.
"Say cheese," the boy said.
"Say cheese," the smiley face replied, but with an unreal robotic
tone rather than a natural human-sounding tone. Simultaneously,
the words "Say cheese" appeared in a little balloon, like in a
cartoon strip, beside the smiley face's mouth. Nicknamed "Myna
Bird," the program, which Ivy had designed, was a crude
demonstration of speech recognition and synthesis, which enabled
the Joey to hear and speak plain English words. The microphone
fed the sounds directly into the converter box and through the
Joey, which interpreted them into actual text and spoken words,
based on a library of words it had already learned.
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