Posts by SteveH
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I've heard that some USB keyboards work through the camera connection kit. Didn't work with either of the keyboards I tried.
Scratch that - turns out you just have ignore the thing when it says the "device is not supported". Keyboards with built in hubs won't work if you plug them straight into the iPad (they draw too much power), but mine works fine if I plug it in via a powered hub.
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The Apple mini Blue tooth wireless Keyboard works too apparently. Have the key board for when I connect Macbook to TV, but no iPad yet.
I've heard that some USB keyboards work through the camera connection kit. Didn't work with either of the keyboards I tried. What did work was a USB hub. Turns out that if you plug in multiple cameras at once it just picks one randomly.
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He said basically it is an iPhone with a bigger screen.
Is this accurate or a heresy?
It's basically a bigger iPod Touch. But if that's meant to be disparaging it's missing the point. The bigger screen makes huge difference to a lot of things. It's the same difference as between a 19" TV and a 41" TV (fixed bad calculation).
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Handing a few words off to a remote server is still a huge step away from transcribing even 30 seconds'-worth of speech.
The iPad is fully capable of transferring audio of sufficient quality of speech recognition in real time. Skype does it bidirectionally, for example. So there is no technical reason that an iPad can't hand off any amount of speech to a server for transcription. It's less convenient than doing the transcription locally, primarily because it requires a network connection and a certain amount of bandwidth, but it's entirely workable. The real issue is still the accuracy of the voice recognition software, wherever it's run.
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Recognising a couple of words (and that poorly enough, from what I've seen, even with the artificial manner of speaking one adopts when talking to a telephone's internal directory) and searching a predefined list is a far, far cry from working with general dictation. Even at 100wpm, which is quite a lot slower than most people talk, that's still a lot of looking-up and comparing.
If you're saying speech recognition isn't generally good enough then I agree totally and have made that point a couple of times already. If you're saying that the only issue is that it's not possible on the iPad then I don't necessarily agree. Even if the hardware is not powerful enough it could still be done by off-loading the work to a server elsewhere (I believe that's how Android does it).
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My point is, typing was a skill you learnt solely for the purpose of interfacing with your computer. It's a skill that we have to learn because of the limitations of the interface.
It's worth remembering that plenty of people were typing before computers came along. Many authors preferred typewriters to pens. A keyboard is a very good interface for getting words from the brain to the page. Nothing better has come along in the nearly 150 years since they were invented.
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(Dragon for Windows requires a 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM, as a bare minimum, and I doubt the Mac version is much different). So no keyboard, no built-in USB ports and no hope in hell of running dictation software.
The iPad has a 1GHz processor, though only 256MB RAM. So it's not that far off. And Android phones of similar spec do voice recognition for search. The hardware is not the problem. The problem is that the accuracy of voice recognition is not high enough for general use.
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And what would that more efficient interface be? What's quicker than typing for writing?
Whatever it might be (and personally I've got no idea), it looks like speech recognition isn't going to be it. According to http://robertfortner.posterous.com/the-unrecognized-death-of-speech-recognition the accuracy of general speech recognition topped out at 80% in 2001 and hasn't improved since. Maybe someone will make a breakthrough, but right now it looks like it's a problem of similar difficulty to true AI (and may even be closely related). So I'm not holding my breath.
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Presumably it won't stay that way forever. Otherwise seriously, if the future of books is being sold exclusively via iTunes, we're screwed.
I hope and expect that it won't just be iTunes and there's already been movement from others. For whatever reason, no one seemed that interested in supplying books on tablets until the iPad. But I'm sure it was coming anyway as the Kindle et al gained popularity.
Is it going to enable people to do without having to buy an iPhone? A desktop computer? A laptop? Because if people are still going to need all of those things, then I think the future just got more expensive to the tune of around $500 a year, plus data charges.
I could imagine living with an iPad and a non-smart phone rather than an iPhone. But I won't as I don't plan on carting the iPad around with me that much. I could also live without my laptop because most of the time I'm home on my desktop machine anyway. But just as laptops have not replaced desktops, tablets won't replace laptops - they're complementary. So maybe the future has just got more expensive.
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I may have remarked before that every other maker of touchscreen tablets must have spit the dummy with all those news reports: "And what's more - you can read books on it!!!!!111!eleven!!!"
But it's as much about the iTunes bookshop as the device itself. Of course you can read books on other tablets, it was getting the books that was difficult.