Having ‘come out’ recently, I thought I’d run this past the Peers(and the rest of the world in general) just for the sake of airing what may be a minority pastime.
Due to my condition Cerebral Atrophy and its associated side effect of Ataxia, I perhaps make more mistakes on a keyboard than the typical IT personnel. Don’t get me wrong – my typing speed is among the highest you’ll ever encounter, but so is the level of typing errors. Many years spent in the Printing/Publishing industry has given me a high command of the spoken and written word but my accuracy ebbs and flows.
Consequently, I also became aware of the shortcomings in XP Pro’s capability to inform me of a system- or user-error. This is because I sometimes forget what the beeps and farts stand for. Therefore even although the system is correct in generating an audible system alert, the effectiveness is lost if I can’t identify what the particular noise is telling me.
So I substituted words for sounds.
Unfortunately I reckon that Uncle Bill didn’t spend much time considering the long-haul application when he created Microsoft Sam. Some of Sam’s utterances are painful to put it mildly.
My weapon of choice is Talking Notepad. The method is similar to Sam but the speech synthesis is far superior. I can have my standard set of phrases in just about any national voice that I like.
At present my system speaks like a Russian Shotputter !! 😉
There is one slight drawback – Networking!!
To solve this my Media Centre sounds like the ship’s computer from Star Trek, my laptop speaks in a Japanese accent and my Gaming Rig as I said, is currently Russian. They all have to be different otherwise, if I’m out of the room, I can’t tell which one has just reported in.
So the question is – Am I alone in this or do others have a speaking computer too ? 🙂