My SpeechShim for Desktop Development of Speech Recognition and TTS Apps

So I've been working on some plugins for PhoneGap to enable people to develop their apps with Speech Recognition and Text to Speech functionality. I've been following this specification and while it isn't on track to be adopted by the W3C anytime soon it does have two big benefits:

1) The speech recognition bit is already available in Chrome.
2) The specification is "sane". I guess it helps when only a couple of people are credited as authors instead of a committee.

One of the things that has been bugging me for awhile is the inability to develop these type of apps on the desktop using the same API. Yes, as I said above the speech rec bit is available in Chrome but the objects have the "webkit" prefix and there is not TTS support. So during one of the Ottawa Ruby project nights I set out to write a shim that would give everyone the ability to use the same API that will be available from the PhoneGap plugins on their desktop.

Basically that is what SpeechShim is in a nutshell. When you add speechshim.js into your web app you will be able to access the "SpeechRecogntion" object instead of needing to prefix it like "webkitSpeechRecognition". As well if you combine it with the speak.js project the speechshim.js code will add the methods necessary so you can use the SpeechSynthesis interface.

To get up and running you will need:

1. A copy of Google Chrome version 29 or higher.
2. A copy of the speak.js project from github.
3. A copy of my speechshim.js from github.

Here's an example HTML page:

and you can run the live demo here. It's nothing fancy. Just click the big button then say something. It should get updated under the button and you will hear it spoken out by the TTS. More on plugin availability for PhoneGap is coming soon.

My WD MyBook Live Crashed

Well, we had a bit of a power hiccup last week and when I got home my WD MyBook Live could no longer be recognized on my home network. Nothing I could do would get the drive working again so I had to assume the power outage fried the ethernet chip on the board of the enclosure. Googling around the internet showed other folks encountered the same problem that I have.

This is the second time a WD enclosure has failed on me. Why, oh why, do I do this to myself. I guess it is because I'm cheap and the WD products offer a good price/functionality ratio. However, what they do not offer is reliability. This is a good lesson for us all not to skimp on quality when you have an important piece of your home setup.

I guess I should explain that I use the MyBook Live to host my iTunes library. As a result it is just packed with shows for my daughter and I really need to get this fixed before she wants to watch Beverly Hills Chihuahua again. As well this drive is setup to be the receptacle of the Time Machine backup on the Mac. I get antsy if my backup isn't running daily even though I also run Carbonite to backup to the cloud.

Anyway, the drive in the enclosure is just fine. I pulled it out and popped it into SATA to USB which works great except for the fact the drive is formatted as XFS. It's a typical Linux file system which predictably isn't recognized by Mac OS or Windows. Luckily there is a great free program called Linux Reader from Disk Internals that you can run on Windows which will allow you read only access to the partitions. I've got it setup on an old Windows laptop now and it is busily copying away.

Too Much Security!

Occasionally I help out a local non-profit organization with computer problems. I'm not writing this post to toot my own horn as it were but rather to try and save other sometime if they run into the same situation.

Basically, I got a call from the non-profit that one of their computers could no longer connect to the internet. They get on the internet by using one of those Bell Turbo Sticks. Remembering a previous issue where McAfee updated the firewall and a new exception had to be put in the firewall rules the first thing I tried was turn off the firewall and attempting to connect to the internet. No dice, still no connection.

This led me to a number of other debugging steps:

1. I tried turning it on and off again.
2. I uninstalled the turbo stick software rebooted and reinstalled.
3. I grabbed the latest software from another computer and updated the turbo stick.
4. I tried the turbo stick in another computer and it worked. What? Wait!

So that meant that there was something wrong with this particular computer and not the turbo stick. I then checked and discovered that McAfee updated it's software on the same day the computer started having problems. I know correlation does not imply causation but it sure did waggle it's eyebrows at me. 

So I started trying other stuff like:

1. Added another exception in the firewall for the tubo stick software.
2. Leaving the firewall on but turning the security to its most permissive.
3. Stopping the firewall altogether.
4. Stopping the firewall, telling it not to restart, the rebooting the computer.
5. Getting fed up and un-installing all of McAfee. 

Then I was able to connect to the internet! Apparently, there is some horrible bug, maybe they call it a security feature, that even when you disable the firewall it keeps rejecting connections for you. So my original hunch looks like it was correct all along and I would have wished I'd uninstalled the software a couple of hours earlier.

Needless to say we are going to go with another anti-virus software provider for the non profit. It's not a big deal as the renewal for McAfee was coming due in 45 days but they are certainly not getting our money now.

Although, I have to hand it to Bell for once. I called their help line and a technician was very helpful and patient as we tried to figure things out. So thanks nameless person on 310-BELL.