Thanks for the complements,

What attracted me you your thread was the term "realistically". We can all dream of all kinds of things we would like the N900 to do, but when it comes down Nokia actually producing a device with existing technology at a price that most of us would pay, it puts a lot of restrictions on things.

That said, I can't see where an extra 128mb of ram would cost a lot, unless these things use some kind of expensive low-powered "static" ram or something like that. I also have a fear running a swap file on flash memory (especially a non removable one!) that is likely to wear out the memory. So currently I since Diablo I've tried turning off the virtual memory. I may try reconfiguring the OS to swap to the external flash because at least it is replaceable. The RAM upgrade would mostly fix this problem. 256megs should be enough for the apps that are currently on this unit, but if someone actually does try to port Openoffice over to this thing, it's going to need more.

The little comment I made about voice recognition was born out of my earlier opposition to any kind of PDA device. I felt that inputting information into one was too difficult with the tiny keyboards, poking at a tiny touch screen, or Graffiti and other attempts at handwriting recognition. It seemed to me such a device should have voice recognition instead. I actually don't know if this would work well in practice, although I seem to getting along with it pretty well on my Motorola mobile phone.

@wartstew

My pleasure.

I understand that the DSP in the current OMAP can perform the calculations necessary (in real-time presumably) for speech to text. They advertise this capability on the TI site, but I'm not sure to what calculations they are referring. Interestingly, this functionality *should* be possible on the N8x0 right now, but it's going to take a coder with an exceptional amount of knowledge (or drive) to utilize this functionality (and understand the concepts behind this type of capability) to bring about voice recog on the tablets. It *should* be possible, however..

I find that, as tasks get more and more complex, the number of individuals that can effectively complete them tends to decrease proportionally. For example: as far as I can tell, the only member of this forum that's been able to even utilize the DSP has been lardman! I would also love to play around with the OMAP hardware, but sadly, I don't have a) the time and b) a tablet!

I *would* love to see voice recognition on the tablets, though. This would be a killer feature that would have tremendous implications.


}:^)~
YARR!

Schmapt'n

Has anyone tried festival for speech recognition?

Yea, the DSP code is probably something Nokia might have to pay someone to do (but please! keep it open source!). DSP's are generally tricky to program in order to get them to have anything close to the performance that they claim to be capable of. For example, I'm assuming the performance boost that Diablo enjoys with YouTube videos is from tweaking the DSP code, as in earlier versions weren't very good.

Does festival do speech recognition as well? I thought it was only speech synthesis...

Yeah . . . no. YouTube performance boosts are due to Flash performance optimization and general browser performance. There is no DSP acceleration.

hmmmm..



[nothing more to say]

Nice thread.

Number 1: by a wide margin is video out. Something like the mini-dvi socket apple use should fit OK. Ideally, this might have higher res than the primary screen (640*480 would be good enough for my purposes). It's probably the only thing that's going to persuade me to trade up to the N900.

Number 2: more ram - ideally enough to run OpenOffice (quick check on a mac shows it running with < 100MB resident memory, though the virtual size is around 500MB; expanding the ram to 256MB, and fixing the problems that limit swap space size to the same size as real memory, would presumably make it runnable, even if slow).

Number 3: proper PIM support - gpe is OK, but somewhat buggy:
.poor integration with alarms (though it seems to work a little better with diablo)
.limited sync options (I use erminig, but that is limited by the options that google calendar supports)
I'm guessing the "internet tablet is not a PIM" refrain from Nokia was a marketing strategy to differentiate it; but this battle has been won, both by the internet tablet, and by the iphone: no-one is likely to think of the tablet as "just another PIM" now. But there still is a demand for PIM support. A small investment by Nokia (I imagine a couple months work by someone who knows the maemo architecture inside out) would get gpe/opensync working well.

Things I don't want:
keyboard slider - when I want a keyboard, it's much more convenient to use a full-size bt keyboard.

Cheers
Bob

Ah, yes, I meant Sphinx. Sorry. I don't know what the requirements are for any of these speech recognition codes, but would be interesting to see. Might be worth spinning this off into its own thread if people want to talk about it more.

Haha... I smell a brain a brewin'..


}:^)~
YARR!

Mr. Corrupt