Gosh! Maybe one of these days someone will take time off from this cultural wonderment to construct a simple, easy to use, text-to-audio.file program - you know, install, paste in some text, convert, start-up a player - so that the blind can listen to texts that aren't recorded in audiobooks. Without a CS degree.
Search all text in New York City
31–40 of 126 posts
Re: Search all text in New York City
#32This is pretty cool!
I'm curious what was used for OCR? Amazon Mechanical Burp?
Re: Search all text in New York City
#33This is exceedingly fun. A game: find an English word with the fewest hits. (It must have at least one hit that is not an OCR error, but such errors do still count towards your score. Only spend a couple of minutes.) My best is "scintillating" : 3.
One match: https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=Buxom
Re: Search all text in New York City
#34There's a lot of PIZZA in New York City!
Re: Search all text in New York City
#35Gosh! Maybe one of these days someone will take time off from this cultural wonderment to construct a simple, easy to use, text-to-audio.file program - you know, install, paste in some text, convert, start-up a player - so that the blind can listen to texts that aren't recorded in audiobooks. Without a CS degree.
I think the issue is the compute power needed for good voice models is far from free just in hardware and electricity, so any good text to audio solution likely needs to cost some money. Wiring up Google vertex AI text to speech or the aws equivalent is probably something chat gpt could walk most people through even without a CS degree, a simple python script you could authenticate from a terminal command, and would maybe cost a couple bucks for personal usage
A service you can pay for of that simplicity probably doesn’t exist because there are other tools that integrate better with how the blind interact with computers, I doubt it’s copy and pasting text, and those tools are likely more robust albeit expensive
Re: Search all text in New York City
#36This is exceedingly fun. A game: find an English word with the fewest hits. (It must have at least one hit that is not an OCR error, but such errors do still count towards your score. Only spend a couple of minutes.) My best is "scintillating" : 3.
First lucky try, “calisthenics” scores a verified 1. It would be interesting if there was a Parquet file of the raw data.
Re: Search all text in New York City
#37[deleted]
Re: Search all text in New York City
#38This is exceedingly fun. A game: find an English word with the fewest hits. (It must have at least one hit that is not an OCR error, but such errors do still count towards your score. Only spend a couple of minutes.) My best is "scintillating" : 3.
“perplexed” gets one hit. It appears in a Bible quotation on an abortion rights poster on West 77th Street. Someone is sleeping beneath the poster:
Re: Search all text in New York City
#39The creator gave a talk that has more details on how it was done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfODe92DzLU
IIRC he found a way to download streetview images without paying, and used the OCR built-in to macOS (which is really good).
Re: Search all text in New York City
#40This is a super cool project. But it would be 10x cooler if they had generated CLIP or some other embeddings for the images, so you could search for text but also do semantic vector search like "people fighting", "cats and dogs, "red tesla", "clown", "child playing with dog", etc.