[Pipet Devel] bioinformatics for the visually impared

[J.W. Bizzaro]

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
-- 
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                      |           J.W. Bizzaro           |
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                      | http://bioinformatics.org/~jeff/ |
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                      |           THE OPEN LAB           |
                      |    Open Source Bioinformatics    |
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                      |    http://bioinformatics.org/    |
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