Hi does anyone know of a snowfall / chance of snow weather api for the UK. I don't mean ski resorts but the actual chance of snow for any location.
Thanks
The BBC has some RSS weather feeds as do Yahoo!.
The BBC one is in plain English so that would take some parsing, the Yahoo! one has a code so you can tell if it's snowing, although not, I think, the percentage chance.
Metcheck do a snow risk report, and also have an API
Related
If you say "Alexa, sing for me", she will choose one of several songs that have been created with her voice. The voice(s) for each of these songs must have been created somehow.
At first, I thought that SSML would provide the tools necessary to do this, especially the <prosody> tag which has parameters for pitch and rate (duration).
I thought perhaps each syllable of singing could have its pronunciation specified with <phoneme> and its pitch and duration specified with <prosody>, with <break> tags in between:
<speak>
<prosody rate="20%">
<phoneme alphabet="x-sampa" ph="U">oo</phoneme>
<break strength="none" />
</prosody>
<prosody rate="20%" pitch="+50%">
<phoneme alphabet="x-sampa" ph="U">oo</phoneme>
<break strength="none" />
</prosody>
<prosody rate="20%">
<phoneme alphabet="x-sampa" ph="U">oo</phoneme>
</prosody>
</speak>
However, when executed, Alexa applies her built-in inflection (to sound like a real human), and so the tone is not flat. These "ooh" sounds (above), for example, each have a falling tone. (They also have a noticeable break between phonemes even tho "no break" was explicitly specified.)
So then, how did the Alexa voice which is heard singing all of those songs get programmed? Was it via tools currently only available to Amazon developers?
It's also perplexing to me that I am apparently the only person on the internet even asking this question (based on zero results in stackoverflow, google, etc), especially this late in the game. Aren't there loads of musicians out there who would love to be able to make Alexa sing whatever they want?
Edit: Guys, I thought it was common knowledge, but there is no human voice actor behind Alexa. Her voice is completely computer-generated.
Alexa's voice is completely computer generated and so are the songs. Research is on-going into generating a singing synthesizer model (#1 and #2).
Here's a video by Popgun Labs regarding how they make their AI sing. Although I am unable to find how Amazon and Google do this, my guess it will be something similar.
EDIT: My earlier answer was based on an extension page and drew incorrect inconclusions.
My prediction would be either something really fancy like Natural Language Processing or something around that lines, AI/ML or they just had the voice actor sing out something or sing particular tones and just cut them together, i don't own an Alexa but i do have a HomePod mini and an iPhone and the way it pronounces our local singer names like "sidhu moosewala" or "amrit maan" (off topic but still related) i believe they just cut and put together words in a "clean" and 'flowing" way.
Perhaps her voice is simply autotuned.
Certainly, pitch-shifting tools can force any desired pitch from any audio source, and I presume such tools can force duration changes as well.
I am looking for real world examples of DAAST tags being trafficked. Anyone know of any audio players that have adopted the new standard yet?
I'm looking at Pandora, iHeartRadio and I'm still seeing VAST tags for advertisements (4-22-2015).
http://www.iab.net/DAAST
I know it's not a great question, but please if any information let me know it's appreciated.
EDIT: Doesn't look like anyone is using DAAST yet will keep this updated. Tried: Pandora, Tunein, iheartRadio, triton, spotify, radio.com, rdio. Triton on their website says they are DAAST compliant, but no DAAST observed there.
I think this it is extremely new format.
Date of publication of official article is 22.01.2015
I can't found any implementation in real web-players in this time :(
Triton Digital did support DAAST day 1... players need to specifically request this format as the default is VAST (and remained as such for backwards compatibility). Most of the advantages of DAAST are leveraged in server-to-server interfaces.
Ok, so I go this VoIP service and need a simple test of the sound quality transmitted. 2 VMs will "talk", and the tests will be done by a third computer. We have the record of the sound spoken and another recording of the sound received(.wav). The testing computer receives both files (pre and pos transmission, pos-transmission should have a little noise or errors) and need to compare the sound quality between then. The only relevant info, would be an output saying how good the quality is at he receiver end. (something like 0.0 - 1.0 score) I'm having a lot of trouble comparing the 2 sounds recorded, any insight and help would be great. Oh yeah, this must be automatized, so there is no one to listen both records and say how bad one of then is. The computer should be able to determine the final quality.
Sorry for any mistake, English is not my first language, and thanks again for any possible help.
The question is very interesting, but unfortunately you have thin chances of getting a perfect solution since it is an open problem. You might be interested in PESQ (Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality) (implementation at: http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-P.862-200102-I/en)
I have an alphabet which has not been tackled before, so when scanned, there's no way to detect the letters for recognition with OCR. I'm trying to program OCR for it, but don't have much experience in this. I'd appreciate some hints as to where to get started, and how such a system is normally implemented.
Take a look at this page--it describes the training process for an open source OCR engine.
The free Stanford Online Machine Learning class has a great set of lessons on Photo OCR in Part XVIII.
This blog post has a brief description of the example taught in the class.
There are some excellent resources at google books. Likewise, if you search for Optical Character Recognition on Amazon, there are some pretty up-to-date books that look to be fairly thick and intellectually challenging :D heh
btw - I'm well aware this post has some age, but you never know when some other person might stumble across this and find just what they need. And if this even has the chance of helping out, then so be it. OCR is such a strange subject, that there's not too much out there that can really really answer the deep-machine ended questions. Especially if you're going to attempt to write your own library. :P
resistors.org site and foxthompson.net download links are stale/broken.
http://www.resistors.org/index.php/The_SAM76_programming_language
Every other link I've been able to track down on the 'net (mostly in old newsgroup posts) are broken. E-mails to the respective webmasters all bounced.
I have a morbid curiosity for arcane programming languages, and SAM76 sounded really interesting to look into and mess around with.
There are quite a few lisp folks lurking on this site, so figured somebody might have a lead... as I heard SAM76 had some early redimentary functional programming ideas.
Extra credit: link to track down a copy of the SAM76 manual!
Wayback has a copy of S76.exe for DOS and Windows
http://web.archive.org/web/20070505122813/http://www.resistors.org/index.php/The_SAM76_programming_language
http://wikivisually.com/wiki/SAM76
http://encycl.opentopia.com/term/Sam76
http://encycl.opentopia.com/term/Algorithms_in_Sam76
======================= F R E E W A R E =======================
User-Supported Software
If you are using this program and find it to be of value
your $20 contribution will be appreciated.
A contribution of $30 will bring you the SAM76 language
manual and other useful and interesting documentation.
SAM76 Inc., Box 257 RR1
Pennington, N.J., 08534
U.S.A.
Regardless of whether you make a contribution,
you are encouraged to copy and share this program.
> ---------------------------------------------------
http://web.archive.org/web/20110726163455/http://www.hypernews.org/HyperNews/get/computing/lang-list/2/2/1.html
I believe the R.E.S.I.S.T.O.R.s (have no idea what the letters
mean) was a group of kids who played with computers and
electronics in Claude Kagan's barn in Pennington, N.J. near
Princeton. Because the developer of TRAC, Calvin Mooers,
spent the rest of his life inventing the software patent and
sued everyone in sight, Claude (whose employer, Western
Electric Laboratories was sued by Mooers) created a very
similar language called "SAM76" supposedly based on S7 and M6
"languages from Bell Labs". I have the original tutorial
manual written and illustrated by the R.E.S.... and versions
on paper tape for the Altair and TRS-80 floppy disk. I think
it looked more like #os#is;; but you could change all the
special characters and command names so it could be made to
look EXACTLY like TRAC. Claude wrote some neat graphic games
for the TRS-80 in SAM76/TRAC.
http://web.archive.org/web/20110726163335/http://www.hypernews.org/HyperNews/get/computing/lang-list/2/2/1/3.html
Yes, we RESISTORS did indeed meet in Claude's barn which was filled with old telephone and computer equipment. Claude's version of TRAC started on the PDP-8, migrated to the PDP-10, and for the legal reasons mentioned ended up as SAM-76. (FYI, SAM stands either for "Strachey and McIlroy" or "Same As Mooers". RESISTORS always stood for "Radically Emphatic Students Interested in Science, Technology, and Other Research Studies" as much as it stood for anything.
Starting when we were members of the RESISTORS, Peter Eichenberger and I wrote a PDP-10 TRAC processor and later reimplemented it for the PDP-11, eventually adding a little multi-terminal time-sharing monitor. We kept a lower profile than Western Electric (either that, or as 19 year olds we had no noticable assets) so we and Mooers stayed on cordial terms.
I don't know if this is useful, but on this page there is an email adress dsf#hci.ucsd.edu which seems to be Dave Fox's one, the guy who maintained the page hosting the SAM76 file.
There's a pile of information in the old SIMTEL archives, specifically CPMUG Volume 34, which is included in the nearly 13G download here including example code. You have your choice of "DSK" and "ARK" (ARC) format images. The standard {file} utility knows what format it's in {CPMUG034.ARC: ARC archive data, dynamic LZW} SIG/M v. 53 also has SAM76 information and you can find it here.