PDA's

[Greg Keto]

I can't see a pda audio interface being done right in any O/S other 
than the palm O/S, CE is out of the question, why should an audio
interface have to run through a GUI? Palm/Visor I think they are both
Palm O/S based, with 3com Palm we had an "Open software architecture"
and with Visor we have an additional "Open hardware architecture"
to develop pda peripherals.

Software speech synthesis for the Palm is crude, Im not sure if its 
a limitation of the mc68328 dragonball processor or the simple 
sound circuitry in the Palm pilot, probably the sound circuit. I have
read stories of Soviet software engineers doing amazing things with 
early Intel processors during the 80's.
 
While the mc68328 is probably a cabable processor for speech synthesis,
its the architecture and storage of the palm pilot pda that limit it for
good software speech synthesis, speech recognition is probably out of
the question. Hardware speech synthesis is probably the best solution
for a good sounding audio interface for the Palm pilot. For input a 
single handed chorded key device would be optimal. Probably cumbersome
to learn, but once learned the combination of good speech output,
chorded key input and a well designed audio interface will provide an
extremly powerful man/machine schemata that would make J.C.R. Licklider
proud. A person can be in motion, eyes free not visually captive, palm
pilot tucked away with earphone output. 

I have heard of a scaled down linux kernel running on the the palm 
pilot but didn't hear anything about performance. A company called
Transmeta recently announced support for embedded Linux in its line
of low power processors. The unique capabilities of these processors
will probably make it possible to create speech recognition/synthesis
engines as intregral parts of the physical/virtual processor.

Good to see people are interested in this sort of thing, maybe this 
can lead to the next generation of operating system. I don't know
what happened in the last 15 years as far as computer interfaces, but
it looks like regression to me. Looks like its gonna take the free
software and open source movement to do what the commercial industry
has failed to do in the last 15 years.

Greg Keto


cpt.kirk at 1tree.net wrote:
> 
> I would agree that the Palm might not be the best place to start. The
> visor seems a much better place to start, but has a drawback. They use USB
> instead of serial for the standard IO. But, they do have an expansion
> slot, and one can get the specs for the slot. I don't know if there is a
> fee to get the specs or not. I would love to know what the performance of
> the thing is when running linux.
> 
> Kirk Wood
> Cpt.Kirk at 1tree.net
> ------------------
> 
> Your fly might be open (but don't check it just now).
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Speakup mailing list
> Speakup at braille.uwo.ca
> http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup