Sunday, June 12, 2011

Audio Collaborative Sites

Many tools now exist for internet users who would like to use voice and audio technology to contribute their opinions and ideas to the web. This has been made easy, both for academic and personal environments, with programs like VoiceThread and Voxopop.

 Among the features of these sites is the ability to comment with audio files from microphones, telephone, text, .mp3, and webcams. This opens accessibility for many different users to contribute to the forum.

These sites also offer the option to embed conversations/forums from their site to another website. This makes other sites more collaborative as well.

Voicethread has a really neat feature that allows users to give visual component to their contributions with a "Doodling" tool that gives a paint program overlay to comments.

The possibilities are increasingly endless!

Sunday, June 05, 2011

Watson, the Jeopardy AI Competitor

NOVA Science has a great video article covering the latest AI design that has been heralded "the Smartest Machine on Earth." Watson, as it's called, is a great advance for CALL in a way, because it is a progression in technology's ability to accurately guess smart searches, track human voice and ultimately begin to deconstruct the barriers between man and machine.