I talked to a Macintosh today. Well, actually, I’ve talked to Macs before, but it was usually under my breath — and hardly printable. The big difference is that today the Mac that I spoke to heard me and responded.
“Connie, shut down.”
“Are you sure you want to do that?”
“Connie, cancel.”
The Mac I spoke to today — the Mac that executed my spoken commands was a new Quadra 840av, officially announced today by Apple. The particular unit I interacted with was named Connie, although it began the day with the name Phil (and with a deeper voice) — gender change being as simple an operation as a quick trip to a Control Panel.
Connie responded to commands from all of the people in the room — no “training” was necessary for her to respond to voices — both male and female — that she had never heard before. She even managed to pick out commands from a room that often was filled with several simultaneous conversations and background noises. Yes, she occasionally mistook commands — she seemed particularly eager to show us her black-and-white mode — but then, after all, Connie is just a beta.
“Connie, open TeachText.”
done
“Connie, close all windows.”
done
Connie has a “dictionary” of 60,000 words, and she automatically understands all menu commands in all of the programs we tried her on. More complex commands have to be taught to Connie, but this is seldom any more difficult than programming a QuicKey.
(If you’re wondering how voice recognition might help you to do graphics work, imagine switching drawing tools with a spoken command — without letting go of the mouse or mousing to a tool palette.)
Voice recognition is only one of the special features of the Quadra 840av, and its “little brother,” the Centris 660av. Voice synthesis seems a minor feat by comparison, but the machine handled subtle tasks with admirable aplomb. We typed “Dr. Julian Dr. is near St. Julian St.” and instructed the computer to “say” that. It responded with “Doctor Julian Drive is near Saint Julian Street.” When we typed “1,000” it responded with the words “one thousand.” We modified that to “$1,000.01” and it made the transition easily: “one thousand dollars and one cent.” It gave the proper inflections and pauses when confronted with commas, question marks, and exclamation points.
The demo did not stop there. If you’re wondering what the “av” in their names stands for, the next demos made that clear: “audio visual.” There are both video in and video out ports that support composite and S-Video. This means that you can use just about any video source (video camera, laser disk, VHS deck, etc.), and do whatever editing you want to do, and then send the signal back out to a video deck or even a regular television set.
In our sneak preview, we saw a tiny color video camera (about 2" square) which was feeding live video into either a window or to the entire Macintosh desktop. (After Dark and Wallpaper, look out; this could be the ultimate screen saver and/or monitor personalization.) It would be simple to attach a TV tuner to these machines so that CNN or your favorite soap can be on your Mac’s screen while you’re working. (Anti-productivity software.) In hindsight, we wonder why (or when) Apple will include a tuner in the box.
The Quadra CPU containing all of this magic looked quite ordinary — until you looked at the new monitor, which contained a standard Trinitron screen but with a set of controls and stereo speakers in the oversized lower bezel. New built-in GeoPort technology is also included which allows you to hook your Mac directly to telephone lines and use it as a telephone, an answering machine, a fax machine, and an electronic mail station. No additional hardware is required! (Can you imagine the next step? Calling your Mac from a remote location and having it read you your e-mail?) A microphone sits unobtrusively in the upper bezel, and it contains special circuitry to cancel out sounds coming from behind the monitor.
Although much of the power in the Quadra box comes from its 40MHz 68040 chip (or 25MHz for the Centris model), many of the amazing new features are made possible by a 66MHz Digital Signal Processor (55MHz for the Centris). This is Apple’s first foray into the field of multiple processors; the DSP handles telecommunications, speech, and audio functions, leaving the 68040 free to handle other tasks. This increases the total system performance markedly.
These are the machines you may have heard referred to by their code names Tempest and Cyclone. Today I learned why.
EDITORS: Don’t reprint the following in your newsletter, just read it and do it:
This article came from Mac Monitor, the newsletter of The Savannah Macintosh Users Group. It may be reprinted in a single issue of newsletters published by non-profit user groups. Payment shall consist of a single issue of the newsletter in which the article appears, sent to the following address:
