First-World Problems.

[Beardy]

My memories of condensed milk included working as an apprentice with the older hairy arsed jointers* whom⁺ made their tea with a spoon full of typhoo tea leaves and a squirt of condensed milk out of a tube in an enamel mug filled with boiling water. It cut out the need to add sugar, though some of them did that as well, and it had a greater shelf life than a bottle of milk in the back of aforementioned hairy arsed jointers wagon.


* a jointer, in telephones speak, was a chap^ who connected two or more many paired cables together, usually while sitting on the cold ground at the edge of a foot way or carriageway box. Thus hairy arsed.

+ unless he happened to have an apprentice allocated to him, whose first, and most important job was to learn how said HAJ took his tea.

^ in those days it was ALWAYS a chap. I remember the first women in the Bradford telephone area to get to be a technician, an operator in the first instance, and her battles to get appointed. It took her nearly two years.

[Auntie Helen]

The Alexa Echo Dot now has a bilingual capability.

As I am living with a German man it seemed polite to allow her to be bilingual English/Deutsch.

Unfortunately, this is only possible if the English is US English rather than British English. So I now have Alexa talking to me in USAian.

[T42]

The Alexa Echo Dot now has a bilingual capability.

As I am living with a German man it seemed polite to allow her to be bilingual English/Deutsch.

Unfortunately, this is only possible if the English is US English rather than British English. So I now have Alexa talking to me in USAian.

I used voice recog software after I broke my right collar-bone in 2002.  The insolent bastard thing would only work* with a Norn Iron accent if I set it to American.

* FSVO work

[Cudzoziemiec]

I occasionally have to deal with the products of speech to text software. It copes very badly with any non-American accent but the very worst I ever encountered was with an Irish accent. Ironically, an actor. Mind you, it doesn't always cope well with American accents.

[Kim]

Barakta's on another level in that respect.  There's something deaf about her speech that the software chokes on, is occasionally noticed by people with experience in what to listen for, and is basically undetectable by normal humans.

It works slightly better if she speaks in an extremely sarcastic tone, like that character from The Mary Whitehouse Experience.  Which is just as well, as that tends to happen natrually when trying to operate a computer by voice command.  Still not good enough for real-world use, unfortunately.

I think we found that Google's speech-to-text engine performed better in USAnian than BRITISH, but I'm suspicious that's just because it's had more development.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Not necessarily more deliberate development but more experience, probably. However, ASR (it's not google I'd be dealing with though I don't actually know what it is) seems to only function really well when two conditions are fulfilled: good audio quality (no crackly phone lines etc, live in-room recording works best); and speakers taking clearly defined turns with no interruptions or overlaps. Copes well with eg lectures, doesn't like question and answer sessions. Those are probably bigger factors even than accent.

[chrisbainbridge]

iPhone app would not connect to the electric blanket so I had to get the old android phone out, connect to the electric blanket and the. They were visible on the iPhone app. Electric blankets now programmed!

[quixoticgeek]

think we found that Google's speech-to-text engine performed better in USAnian than BRITISH, but I'm suspicious that's just because it's had more development.

It basically depends upon the Corpus that it is trained with. There are various standardised Corpii that are used for such things, but they are an equalities and accessibility horror show. In her Book Invisible Women Caroline Criado-Perez goes into this at length. It's a problem especially for women, as the corpii just don't have enough women's voices in there. The result is that sometimes you can get the thing to understand you simply by talking with a deeper voice.

Perhaps one for the "Today I learned..." thread, but part of the corpus used for training these systems is the Enron emails. The autocomplete thing in gmail? that is based in a not insignificant way, upon the emails from Enron! The beautiful nerds over at 99 percent invisible made a whole podcast about it.

In short, voice recognition sucks cos of GIGO. If they trained it with a better corpus, we'd have a better result.

J

[Cudzoziemiec]

iPhone app would not connect to the electric blanket so I had to get the old android phone out, connect to the electric blanket and the. They were visible on the iPhone app. Electric blankets now programmed!

This thread is now complete.

[Mr Larrington]

Dear the bloody BBC,

How very dare you delay tonight’s episode of “His Dark Materials” by ten whole minutes!  Don’t you know there’s a war on?

Disgusted of E17

Also the Humax was tuned to C4 when I switched it on.  Meaning audiovisual pollution of the fat-tongued Mockney wanker variety.

[Ham]

The Alexa Echo Dot now has a bilingual capability.

As I am living with a German man it seemed polite to allow her to be bilingual English/Deutsch.

Unfortunately, this is only possible if the English is US English rather than British English. So I now have Alexa talking to me in USAian.

Think that's a problem? Try asking Mr Google to play some music by Maite Hontele.

[Mr Larrington]

The Alexa Echo Dot now has a bilingual capability.

As I am living with a German man it seemed polite to allow her to be bilingual English/Deutsch.

Unfortunately, this is only possible if the English is US English rather than British English. So I now have Alexa talking to me in USAian.

Think that's a problem? Try asking Mr Google to play some music by Maite Hontele.

Or HṚṢṬA…

[Cudzoziemiec]

The Alexa Echo Dot now has a bilingual capability.

As I am living with a German man it seemed polite to allow her to be bilingual English/Deutsch.

Unfortunately, this is only possible if the English is US English rather than British English. So I now have Alexa talking to me in USAian.

Think that's a problem? Try asking Mr Google to play some music by Maite Hontele.

Or HṚṢṬA…

/ˈhɜːrʃtə/ according to Wikipedia. Whereas my instinct would have been to insert vowel twixt R and S.

[Beardy]

Today I have to dismantle the thermostatic mixer valve in the shower because it’s leaking. However, due to ineptitude or inconvenience at the time of install, the plumber did not fit service valves and I am therefore going to have to turn off the water supply for the whole house. This is a decision that has made me somewhat a persona non grata hereabouts.

[TimC]

Today I have to dismantle the thermostatic mixer valve in the shower because it’s leaking. However, due to ineptitude or inconvenience at the time of install, the plumber did not fit service valves and I am therefore going to have to turn off the water supply for the whole house. This is a decision that has made me somewhat a persona non grata hereabouts.

You've just reminded me of another job I have to do...

[Paul]

My shower head sometimes manages to catch me with a drop of cold water as I exit, after I've dried myself.

It ruins my day every time it happens!

[ian]

We have one of those digital showers. You set the temperature and it blinks until it's ready. There's no danger at all of cold. It's my favourite thing.

[hatler]

Today I have to dismantle the thermostatic mixer valve in the shower because it’s leaking. However, due to ineptitude or inconvenience at the time of install, the plumber did not fit service valves and I am therefore going to have to turn off the water supply for the whole house. This is a decision that has made me somewhat a persona non grata hereabouts.

Yup. That boils my piss too. We've got one of those to sort out (for a sink though).

[Polar Bear]

Today I have to dismantle the thermostatic mixer valve in the shower because it’s leaking. However, due to ineptitude or inconvenience at the time of install, the plumber did not fit service valves and I am therefore going to have to turn off the water supply for the whole house. This is a decision that has made me somewhat a persona non grata hereabouts.

Oh, my shower has shut off valves.  Unfortunately they are hidden behind the bloody tiling.  Which fool didn't spot that happening then?   

[TimC]

We have one of those digital showers. You set the temperature and it blinks until it's ready. There's no danger at all of cold. It's my favourite thing.

One of the joys of my old house was a shower which you could turn on from the bed, and it would let you know when it was up to temperature. It was my one demand when I had the en-suite bathroom rebuilt. It'll be on my list of essentials when I rebuild the bathroom in my current house.

[ian]

I honestly don't know why all showers aren't like this (I don't need bed-based activation, it only takes a few seconds). Select temperature, wait, get in. Yet everywhere I go, it's still the random bloody mixer taps, endless jiggery trying to get the right temperature and then, thirty seconds later it goes hot, cold, hot, cold, or you inadvertently activate the scald/freeze feature with your arse because the tap is right there.

Hotels were terrible for this, every new stay came with the first-morning horror of figuring out the shower.

[TimC]

I was lucky enough to often stay in hotels where remote shower controls were the norm, particularly in the mid- and Far East. It's definitely a luxury, but it is rather wonderful to press a switch by the bed, have it beep back at you and know that the shower is ready and at full flow when you get there (which could be a long way in some UAE hotels!). Of course, in-home ones these days would probably require an argument with Alexa before you got what you wanted, and would probably also involve unwanted deliveries of stuffs.

[ian]

Singapore had them (the airport hotel is very nice), some of the NH places dotted around Europe, and also in Taiwan and Vietnam if I recall. Possibly KL. Nowhere in the US, of course, since everything there is still c1955.

Bumping around Africa led to some more interesting showering incidents, of course.

[Salvatore]

Bumping around Africa led to some more interesting showering incidents, of course.

On a holiday in Mali a couple of decades ago, we (a group of 5) were sitting on the roof of our accommodation eating our evening meal. We were in a small village somewhere near Dogon country as I recall. Anyway, someone noticed three girls walking from the river, each carrying a colourful bucket on their head, the size of the bucket being roughly proportional to their size. We watched as they walked between the low mud-built houses, then disappeared out of sight below our building, before reappearing on our roof and pouring the contents of the buckets into the big tank, before returning to the river to repeat the task.

Yes, this was the water for our showers.  A stark first world/third world contrast.

[Regulator]

We received a hamper today from work, for our Zoom Christmas lunch tomorrow.  I've run out of room in the fridge now... and I have a veg box delivery in the morning.