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Re: my wearcomp wish list

From: Doug Sutherland <>
Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2001 13:13:01 -0700

Melanie McGee wrote:

> What I would be interested in is those portable keyboards for Palm
> computers. They fold up, are light weight, and have the feel of a normal
> keyboard. Has anyone hacked on of these yet? I think that would be a worthy
> project.

Ralf Ackerman has done a lot of PDA keyboard hacking.
http://www.iptel-now.de/PROJECTS/WEARABLE/wearable.html

The problem with PDA keyboards is that they are serial interfaces that
plug into PDA serial ports, not PS/2. So if you want to use them with 
a PC you need to either write a new keyboard driver or add circuitry 
to make them PS/2 compatible. I have one of these little Cirque PDA
keyboards, will be hacking on this soon:

http://www.cirque.com/new/pocket_keyboard.shtml

If I can figure out the serial protocol, I'm going to try two things:

1) Make a small tty serial terminal consisting of a cirque pocket 
   keyboard and a VFD text display capable of 16x42 characters. 
   Both will interface to a microcontroller, which plugs into the
   serial port on embedded PC. PC running linux runs getty which 
   allows console login.

2) I might try writing a new keyboard driver that allows the cirque
   pocket keyboard to plug into serial port directly instead of the
   ususal PS/2 port. It must be doable, twiddler original did that. 

> I like the idea of voice recognition, and it may be practical for certain
> applications, however the technology has a very long way to go and I'm not
> so sure it will ever get there.

Have you tried ViaVoice lately? I was quite impressed with its 
accuracy. You have to go through "enrollment" sessions to teach 
the system how your voice sounds. You have to practice at the 
recognition to get accurate results. I still don't think its 
very good for dictation, but it should be good for command 
and control purposes. I'm not doing much with recognition yet
but I'm have a blast with ViaVoice TTS (text-to-speech) synth.

> Therefore, you may envision why I'm not very impressed with 
> the voice recognition technology as of yet. I honestly think 
> it would be more of a headache than it's worth and the 
> novelty would probably wear off on me after a few days.

Its not private either. Tends to intrude on others. But speech
is advancing fast. IBM has embedded ViaVoice that runs in small
places. This can't to the full dictation like ViaVoice runtime
on x86 windows or linux, but it has something like 500 words
for voice command/control. That's probably enough to do a lot 
of advanced voice control on wearables. Unfortunately it costs
a lot of money, otherwise I'd be trying it out now.      

> I received an email the Ricochet went "bye-bye". Too bad.

Still grieving over here. sniff.

  -- Doug

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