Vox ex Machina
Vox ex Machina

Author: Sarah A. Bell

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2024-09-24

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0262546353

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How today’s digital devices got their voices, and how we learned to listen to them. From early robots to toys like the iconic Speak & Spell to Apple’s Siri, Vox Ex Machina tells the fascinating story of how scientists and engineers developed voices for machines during the twentieth century. Sarah Bell chronicles the development of voice synthesis from buzzy electrical current and circuitry in analog components to the robotic sounds of early digital signal processing to today’s human sounding applications. Along the way, Bell also shows how the public responded to these technologies and asks whether talking machines are even good for us. Using a wide range of intriguing examples, Vox Ex Machina is embedded in a wider story about people—describing responses to voice synthesis technologies that often challenged prevailing ideas about computation and automation promoted by boosters of the Information Age. Bell helps explain why voice technologies came to sound and to operate in the way they do—influenced as they were by a combination of technical assumptions and limitations, the choices of the corporations that deploy them, and the habits that consumers developed over time. A beautifully written book that will appeal to anyone with a healthy skepticism toward Silicon Valley, Vox Ex Machina is an important and timely contribution to our cultural histories of information, computing, and media.

Critical Role Vox Machina: Origins Volume I
Critical Role Vox Machina: Origins Volume I

Author: Critical Role

Publisher: Dark Horse Comics

Published: 2019-10-15

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 1506714811

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From the creators of the hit show "Critical Role" comes Vox Machina's origin story! Writers Matthew Mercer and Matthew Colville team with artist extraordinaire Olivia Samson and colorist Chris Northrop to bring you the story of where the heroes' journey began. The band of adventurers known as Vox Machina will save the world. Eventually. But even they have to start somewhere. Six would-be heroes on seemingly different jobs find their paths intertwined as they investigate shady business in the swamp town of Stilben. They'll need to put their heads-- and weapons--together to figure out what's going on...and keep from being killed in the process. Even then, whether or not they can overcome what truly lurks at the bottom of the town's travails remains to be seen! Collects Critical Role Vox Machina: Origins comics issues #1-6, one of the best selling digital comics ever!

How to Wreck a Nice Beach
How to Wreck a Nice Beach

Author: Dave Tompkins

Publisher: Melville House

Published: 2011-11-08

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 1612190936

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The history of the vocoder: how popular music hijacked the Pentagon's speech scrambling weapon The vocoder, invented by Bell Labs in 1928, once guarded phones from eavesdroppers during World War II; by the Vietnam War, it was repurposed as a voice-altering tool for musicians, and is now the ubiquitous voice of popular music. In How to Wreck a Nice Beach—from a mis-hearing of the vocoder-rendered phrase “how to recognize speech”—music journalist Dave Tompkins traces the history of electronic voices from Nazi research labs to Stalin’s gulags, from the 1939 World’s Fair to Hiroshima, from artificial larynges to Auto-Tune. We see the vocoder brush up against FDR, JFK, Stanley Kubrick, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, Kraftwerk, the Cylons, Henry Kissinger, and Winston Churchill, who boomed, when vocoderized on V-E Day, “We must go off!” And now vocoder technology is a cell phone standard, allowing a digital replica of your voice to sound human. From T-Mobile to T-Pain, How to Wreck a Nice Beach is a riveting saga of technology and culture, illuminating the work of some of music’s most provocative innovators.

Explorer's Guide to Wildemount (D&D Campaign Setting and Adventure Book) (Dungeons & Dragons)
Explorer's Guide to Wildemount (D&D Campaign Setting and Adventure Book) (Dungeons & Dragons)

Author: Dungeons & Dragons

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2020-03-17

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0786966912

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HOW DO YOU WANT TO DO THIS? A war brews on a continent that has withstood more than its fair share of conflict. The Dwendalian Empire and the Kryn Dynasty are carving up the lands around them, and only the greatest heroes would dare stand between them. Somewhere in the far corners of this war-torn landscape are secrets that could end this conflict and usher in a new age of peace—or burn the world to a cinder. Create a band of heroes and embark on a journey across the continent of Wildemount, the setting for Campaign 2 of the hit Dungeons & Dragons series Critical Role. Within this book, you’ll find new character options, a heroic chronicle to help you craft your character’s backstory, four different starting adventures, and everything a Dungeon Master needs to breathe life into a Wildemount-based D&D campaign… · Delve through the first Dungeons & Dragons book to let players experience the game as played within the world of Critical Role, the world’s most popular livestreaming D&D show. · Uncover a trove of options usable in any D&D game, featuring subclasses, spells, magic items, monsters, and more, rooted in the adventures of Exandria—such as Vestiges of Divergence and the possibility manipulating magic of Dunamancy. · Start a Dungeons & Dragons campaign in any of Wildemount’s regions using a variety of introductory adventures, dozens of regional plot seeds, and the heroic chronicle system—a way to create character backstories rooted in Wildemount. Explore every corner of Wildemount and discover mysteries revealed for the first time by Critical Role Dungeon Master, Matthew Mercer.

Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn
Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn

Author: Matthew Mercer

Publisher:

Published: 2021-12-31

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781737372509

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Welcome to Tal'Dorei, a fantasy-filled continent brimming with grand tales of heroes and adventure - and eagerly awaiting your own epic stories. Soar on a skyship from the metropolis of Emon to the distant haven of Whitestone, venture into wilderness rife with terrifying monsters and wayward mages, and uncover magic items that range from simple trinkets to the legendary Vestiges of Divergence. The hit series Critical Role first explored this continent through the epic adventures of Vox Machina. Now the world moves on in their wake. This campaign setting is newly revised and expanded to cover the exciting conclusion of the Vox Machina campaign and the characters lives in the years following. Let your footsteps, too, shape the fate of Tal'Dorei and perhaps the wider world of Exandria.This definitive, art-filled tomb is revised and expanded, containing everything you need to unlock the rich campaign setting of Tal'Dorei and make it your own:- A guide to each major region, with story hooks to fuel your campign- Expanded character options, including 9 subclasses and 5 backgrounds- Magic items such as the Vestiges of Divergence, legendary artifacts that grow in power with their wielders- Dozens of creatures, including many featured in the Critical Role campaigns- New lore and updated stat blocks for each member of Vox Machina

Everyday Adventures with Unruly Data
Everyday Adventures with Unruly Data

Author: Melanie Feinberg

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-10-11

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 0262371456

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Paired informal and scholarly essays show how everyday events reveal fundamental concepts of data, including its creation, aggregation, management, and use. Whether questioning numbers on a scale, laughing at a misspelling of one’s name, or finding ourselves confused in a foreign supermarket, we are engaging with data. The only way to handle data responsibly, says Melanie Feinberg in this incisive work, is to take into account its human character. Though the data she discusses may seem familiar, close scrutiny shows it to be ambiguous, complicated, and uncertain: unruly. Drawing on the tools of information science, she uses everyday events such as deciding between Blender A and Blender B on Amazon to demonstrate a practical, critical, and generative mode of thinking about data: its creation, management, aggregation, and use. Each chapter pairs a self-contained main essay (an adventure) with a scholarly companion essay (the reflection). The adventure begins with an anecdote—visiting the library, running out of butter, cooking rice on a different stove. Feinberg argues that to understand the power and pitfalls of data science, we must attend to the data itself, not merely the algorithms that manipulate it. As she reflects on the implications of commonplace events, Feinberg explicates fundamental concepts of data that reveal the many tiny design decisions—which may not even seem like design at all—that shape how data comes to be. Through the themes of serendipity, objectivity, equivalence, interoperability, taxonomy, labels, and locality, she illuminates the surprisingly pervasive role of data in our daily thoughts and lives.

AI Assistants
AI Assistants

Author: Roberto Pieraccini

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2021-09-07

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0262542552

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An accessible explanation of the technologies that enable such popular voice-interactive applications as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant. Have you talked to a machine lately? Asked Alexa to play a song, asked Siri to call a friend, asked Google Assistant to make a shopping list? This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a nontechnical and accessible explanation of the technologies that enable these popular devices. Roberto Pieraccini, drawing on more than thirty years of experience at companies including Bell Labs, IBM, and Google, describes the developments in such fields as artificial intelligence, machine learning, speech recognition, and natural language understanding that allow us to outsource tasks to our ubiquitous virtual assistants. Pieraccini describes the software components that enable spoken communication between humans and computers, and explains why it's so difficult to build machines that understand humans. He explains speech recognition technology; problems in extracting meaning from utterances in order to execute a request; language and speech generation; the dialog manager module; and interactions with social assistants and robots. Finally, he considers the next big challenge in the development of virtual assistants: building in more intelligence--enabling them to do more than communicate in natural language and endowing them with the capacity to know us better, predict our needs more accurately, and perform complex tasks with ease.