Live data from Hacker News

The telephone transformed – into almost everything (1993)

nytimes.com

11–19 of 19 posts

Re: The telephone transformed – into almost everything (1993)

#12

>"Oh," he says. "You mean why no voice dialing? Saying 'Get Fred' or 'Get Sam' or something? I don't have a voice dialer." He will soon, surely. Any day now, he will be able to pick up a phone anywhere and say "Call home" to a network that will recognize his voice and look up his home number (verifying his credit by means of his voiceprint). In hindsight that's a... yesn't.

Only way I see something like that working is AI/ML and you'd need to vastly expand voice bandwidth past what PSTN is in order to have enough information for it to work. And even then who's to say people's voices, verbal idiosyncrasies, accents aren't still too similar to differentiate?

Re: The telephone transformed – into almost everything (1993)

#13

This hasn't held up well: > Martin E. P. Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania [...] has been monitoring the temperature of emotional incidents on the computer network to see how they differ from "real time" emotion. The constraints of the form tend to flatten anger and push toward civility, he finds.

I wonder if this was just population effects. The group of people communicating over the internet in 1993 is not the same as the group of people doing so today.

Re: The telephone transformed – into almost everything (1993)

#15
post #12

>"Oh," he says. "You mean why no voice dialing? Saying 'Get Fred' or 'Get Sam' or something? I don't have a voice dialer." He will soon, surely. Any day now, he will be able to pick up a phone anywhere and say "Call home" to a network that will recognize his voice and look up his home number (verifying his credit by means of his voiceprint). In hindsight that's a... yesn't.

Only way I see something like that working is AI/ML and you'd need to vastly expand voice bandwidth past what PSTN is in order to have enough information for it to work. And even then who's to say people's voices, verbal idiosyncrasies, accents aren't still too similar to differentiate?

For whatever it's worth, I've seen AT&T experiment with voice recognition for authentication. One of the Achiles' Heels of the system is you can collect a lot of the samples you need to bypass it from peoples' voicemail greetings. Especially if like for some jobs, they're required to re-record the greeting every day, i.e. "Today is Monday, June 17th, and I'm in the office..."

That being said, linear predictive codecs used in mobile/lower bandwidth IP networks have damaged the sound quality of the PSTN quite significantly (some are even vocoderized). If you're just dealing with, say, g.711 in wireline networks (when this was written, aside from g.722 in some ISDN networks, g.711 was used almost exclusively; GSM was very much a niche in its infancy), you might be able to squeak by with enough data to reliably recognize people.

Re: The telephone transformed – into almost everything (1993)

#16

This hasn't held up well: > Martin E. P. Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania [...] has been monitoring the temperature of emotional incidents on the computer network to see how they differ from "real time" emotion. The constraints of the form tend to flatten anger and push toward civility, he finds.

I wonder if this was just population effects. The group of people communicating over the internet in 1993 is not the same as the group of people doing so today.

Eternal September was in 1993.

Re: The telephone transformed – into almost everything (1993)

#17

This hasn't held up well: > Martin E. P. Seligman, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania [...] has been monitoring the temperature of emotional incidents on the computer network to see how they differ from "real time" emotion. The constraints of the form tend to flatten anger and push toward civility, he finds.

I wonder if this was just population effects. The group of people communicating over the internet in 1993 is not the same as the group of people doing so today.

Also depends on where you look. As far as I recall, and understand, trolling and flame wars began in Usenet newsgroups

edit: at least the terms, more so than the behaviors they describe

Re: The telephone transformed – into almost everything (1993)

#18
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://archive.is/ThQGB

I thought archive.is no longer works...??? Edit: it doesn't work for me still. Edit again: Australia blocks it at an IP level?

Ha! Systemic copyright infringement shouldn't be easy.

Re: The telephone transformed – into almost everything (1993)

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought archive.is no longer works...??? Edit: it doesn't work for me still. Edit again: Australia blocks it at an IP level?

Ha! Systemic copyright infringement shouldn't be easy.

Why not?
Post reply on HN