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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

#95

Post by kalpeshjoshi »

This is an excellent idea, another medium to get the message, especially using older phone technology. I think the arabic speech recognition / txt translation is on it's way, we've come a long way with just character based text translations (i.e. mandarin, hindi, etc.).

Another thought: it actually seems like the reverse strategy of the aftermath of the floods in Australia. Where services need to keep the phone lines open for rescue workers and orgs, so people could tweet their distress msgs and location to relief orgs using broadband access over 3g.

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

#96

Post by [deleted] »

jbri wrote: post #57
qq66 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the revolution is successful but the current government is replaced with something far worse? Would you want to be part of a company that encouraged that?

Yes, let's support brutal dictatorships on the off-chance that a revolution might result in an even more brutal dictatorship.

[deleted]

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

#97

Post by Mafana0 »

psyklic wrote: post #88
iacvlvs wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't listen to it right now. Could someone please transcribe it?

I strongly recommend listening for the full effect, but here is a rough translation for those who cannot. My apologies on likely misspelling the lady's name. The grammar tries to reflect her speed/pauses/etc: Hi, this is Monasef from Cairo. I just wanted to let the world know that we have been disconnected from our last point of communications through the Internet .. and there is a strong word going around that we wi…

You are a gentleman and a scholar...

The name of the lady is Mona Saif, who sent another tweet in Arabic (native speaker here): http://bit.ly/dTj11s

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

#98

Post by ugh »

elliottcarlson wrote: post #73

I am surprised no one is concerned about this in regards to the safety of the callers. The government is obviously taking all steps in silencing in or outbound communication - with the obvious control structure in place over communications, it would seem feasible for the government to trace calls to these specific numbers (even if they block them) and punish people who do so. Don't get me wrong, I want to know what i…

There are limits to what a government can do. Secrecy matters greatly in conspiracies, my suspicion is that it matters a whole deal less in revolutions. In those the regime has other priorities than chasing some random people who called that number, they are probably not even aware of it.

Many things people in Egypt currently do would probably lead to punishment if they did it all on their own, the mass protects them (and that’s one of the reasons why revolutions can work at all). Even if the regime decides to do something about it they would have to use blunt force and not surgical precision, there are just too many things happening at the same time to deal with all of them individually.

This obviously doesn’t make it absolutely certain that there will be no problems, I just think it’s rather unlikely.

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

#99

Post by Unseelie »

corin_ wrote: post #85
gbhn wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. Protests and revolutions are dangerous business. It makes me thoughtful about whether I'd be brave enough to take advantage of these kinds of tools should the necessity arise.

I'd rather take my chances of being one of hundreds (or thousands) of people speaking out on twitter than being one of hundreds of thousands marching on the streets against tanks and men with guns. Regardless, personally I'd do both. While it's nowhere near comparable to the situation in Egypt, witnessing police brutality in English demonstrations (yes, FAR FAR FAR less severe than in Egypt, but still... one of my ea…

Last I heard, the people with tanks were fans of the revolution...

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

#100

Post by csomar »

randomtask wrote: post #49
ars wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 o…

The language Egyptians speak is Arabic. Voice recognition software for that language does exist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAKHR_Software_Company#Speech_R...

Arabic has variants. Each Arabic country speaks a different variant, many words are changed. For example, in Tunisia, a good number of our daily used words are from French.

But that language is only used in public; books and newspapers uses the original language.

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