Locians, The last time Gary and I met, we brainstormed a way to control Loci using natural language. This is what we've been calling the 'NLI' (Natural Language Interface - more on this later). Well, it looks like the control of Loci, via talking and listening to it, is coming to a GNU/Linux system near you. First, speech recognition: "CMU Sphinx (the speech recognition software being developed at CMU being funded by DARPA and NSF for the last 15 years) has gone open source and is up for download on SourceForge. You can check out the announcement, go to the home page at CMU, or download the code for yourself. It should build out-of-box on several platforms, linux, freebsd, sun4m, etc. - but work is still needed. Help with documentation would be greatly appreciated, too. It's important that people grab this stuff ASAP, too, just in case some people decide to go after it for potential patent violations (we all know how much people love the patent system)." http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/01/31/0848243&mode=flat And what use is having Loci listen to you, if it can't talk back? "When thinking of Linux, the words 'user friendly' do not generally come immediately to mind. Therefore, one might be surprised to learn that Linux 2.4 (and some later editions of the Linux 2.2 kernel) supports speech synthesizer cards. This driver and the appropriate hardware will allow vision-impaired Linux users to hear all Linux output, including messages very early in the boot process. Very few Operating Systems can boast such low level support for these devices. (There will be other patches and utilities that will be required for full use of these devices, this kernel driver is only a component of the system.)" http://linuxtoday.com/stories/15936.html So, how about bioinformatics for the visually impared? Cheers. Jeff -- +----------------------------------+ | J.W. Bizzaro | | | | http://bioinformatics.org/~jeff/ | | | | THE OPEN LAB | | Open Source Bioinformatics | | | | http://bioinformatics.org/ | +----------------------------------+