

The Verbalizer – An open source board to use with Google's Voice Search - kirtan
http://breakfastny.com/verbalizer

======
lkrubner
This event was impressively organized, even though the software was very alpha
and untested and hard to make work. I posted some photos here:

[http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/micro-controllers-
sod...](http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/micro-controllers-soder-pizza-
and-beer)

I should also add, the headline here on Hacker News is misleading. Yes, the
demo connects the Verbalizer to Google Search, but you can do a hell of a lot
else with it. That's the whole point. You could argue that it's basically a
glorified microphone, but one that's got a bunch of points of control added to
it. The 2 women sitting across from us connected a heat sensor to to the
Verbalizer, so they started getting heat data from it and feeding it into
their laptop. They didn't have time to do anything cool with that input, but
clearly, this is an area that is wide open for experimentation.

By the way, all of the equipment was given to us for free. Even the sodering
iron was given to us for free. I guess Google was throwing around some
marketing dollars. This is the most impressive free event I've been to in
months.

------
zmanian
This is a perfect example of why we need the Chromium developers to come to
consensus on an acceptable UI for programmatic triggering of the HTML5 speech
API.

In this implementation, they have to actually take over the computers mouse
and have it press the microphone Icon to capture input.

------
MikeCapone
I don't want to sound like a guy from the 1990s, but it's nice to see so many
women interested in hacking. Looks like a great event, kudos to the
organisers.

~~~
lkrubner
That struck me as well. The organizers were 5 guys and 1 woman, so if you look
at the photos it looks like the room is majority male. However, of the
attendees, there were 9 men and 9 women. I was curious about that. We were
all, in a sense, handpicked to be at this event -- after we signed up they
sent us an email every day saying "Are you sure you still want to be in,
please reply by 10 PM or you are kicked out." (I'm paraphrasing, they were
slightly more diplomatic.) We failed to reply on Sunday night so we got kicked
out. Then on Monday they told us there was an opening (someone else failed to
reply and got kicked out). So we got back in. But the point is, everyone who
was there was, in a sense, picked. So I'm curious if the organizers
deliberately engineered the 50/50 gender split.

The whole thing was videotaped, and we had to sign a release form for the
video as soon as we walked in.

------
tocomment
I don't get it. How do the google search results get back to the board? Is the
board parsing the search results?

Also, surely this violates Googe's TOS.

~~~
joezydeco
The article said nothing about search results going back to the board.

~~~
tocomment
oh, so what's the point? It's basically a bluetooth microphone?

~~~
joezydeco
Yup. With a widget on the PC side to take the waves and shove them into
Google.

