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Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard

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Re: Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard

#31

Post by Timothee »

dholowiski wrote: post #16

Very cool. I assumed it would be filled up with Spam right away, but it's not - they must be doing some kind of filtering to make sure only Egyptian callers can leave a message. Most of the messages are not in english (duh) but here are a couple english messages. I'm surprised google isn't doing speech recognition and translating these for us too. http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0... http:/…

I'm surprised google isn't doing speech recognition and translating these for us too.

I'd think the problem is that you're piling up two technologies known for being very approximate and the results would be likely to be pretty far off to the original meaning. Which is especially sensitive for the current situation.

Re: Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard

#34

Post by hugh3 »

moultano wrote: post #20
p90x wrote: post #4

Seeing Americans companies take sides in the politics of foreign countries in such enthusiastic, carefree ways leaves me feeling very uneasy.

Why?

I'm not the OP, but I can see his point. Foreigners (not just Americans) taking sides in political disputes which they don't really understand might wind up helping the wrong side. Even if we just define "the wrong side" as "not the side they would have supported if they'd known more about the situation".

Alternatively, even if they pick "the right side", they might wind up inadvertently helping the wrong side, since the right side can then say "Hey look, our enemies are being propped up by foreign interests!"

Does this mean that foreigners can't take sides in political battles going on in other countries? No, but they should certainly be circumspect about it and do their research and not jump on a bandwagon just because it happens to smell nice.

Re: Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard

#35

Post by borism »

p90x wrote: post #4

Seeing Americans companies take sides in the politics of foreign countries in such enthusiastic, carefree ways leaves me feeling very uneasy.

take a look at the names of authors of the blog post:

Posted by Ujjwal Singh, CoFounder of SayNow and AbdelKarim Mardini, Product Manager, Middle East & North Africa

Re: Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard

#36

Post by ars »

dholowiski wrote: post #16

Very cool. I assumed it would be filled up with Spam right away, but it's not - they must be doing some kind of filtering to make sure only Egyptian callers can leave a message. Most of the messages are not in english (duh) but here are a couple english messages. I'm surprised google isn't doing speech recognition and translating these for us too. http://www.saynow.com/playMsg.html?ak=TkxFNENGTHVQQzdTdVE4N0... http:/…

"I'm surprised google isn't doing speech recognition and translating these for us too."

It's because speech recognition does not exist for Egyptian Arabic.

There are some research programs, but no actual completed products.

This may be surprising to some, but speech recognition is only available in a small number of languages. Mainly European languages plus Chinese.

There is nothing preventing speech recognition in other languages, it's just no one has done it.

Re: Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard

#37

Post by pyre »

p90x wrote: post #4

Seeing Americans companies take sides in the politics of foreign countries in such enthusiastic, carefree ways leaves me feeling very uneasy.

'Not taking sides in foreign politics' also brings us things like US networking supplies companies selling dictatorships that means to suppress free speech on their countries' internet access.

The real questions is: how does one 'take no sides' when dealing with international commerce? Is selling weapons to both sides, 'taking no sides?' Or is the only true way to 'take no sides' just to refuse to do international business at all?

Re: Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard

#38

Post by yanw »

p90x wrote: post #4

Seeing Americans companies take sides in the politics of foreign countries in such enthusiastic, carefree ways leaves me feeling very uneasy.

It's primarily a human rights issue. If they have the resources they should do something so kudos to everyone involved.

Re: Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard

#39

Post by mkelly »

hugh3 wrote: post #34
moultano wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

I'm not the OP, but I can see his point. Foreigners (not just Americans) taking sides in political disputes which they don't really understand might wind up helping the wrong side. Even if we just define "the wrong side" as "not the side they would have supported if they'd known more about the situation". Alternatively, even if they pick "the right side", they might wind up inadvertently helping the wrong side, since…

I agree in principle, but in this case there's one side attempting to cut off all uncontrolled communication in and out of the country. It seems like an easy choice to side against their position on communication.

Re: Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard

#40

Post by citricsquid »

This raises a thought for me with regards to my own Twitter usage. I find this a great idea and would like to follow it, but the high level of tweets this produces will saturate my stream and block out the other people I'm also interested in (I follow ~30 people and keep the people I follow limited to those I am truly interested in) so I wonder, could Twitter eventually have some sort of "Watch" feature?

Display would be the same style as trending (maybe next to it and re-position the suggested users) where each "watched" user is displayed with a running tally of total tweets and next to that the # of new tweets since I last visited their page? I guess lists would be a temporary solution, but even they get saturated easily.

completely off topic, but maybe some others share the same desire, I figure this is a good topic to use as an example :-)

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