For those of you that know or have met Crunchy Frog, may have an idea of what an ego maniac he is. Let me just reassure you that he is exactly like this in real life.
Just now as I was reading some threads on SDMB, sitting behind me at another desk, I hear him typing away on his laptop. This laptop is pretty cool, it works on voice commands, tells him jokes …etc. Apparently he closed something because this is what I heard…
“Your Highness.”
I simply turned around and asked him if his computer just called him “Highness” and he smiled largely and said “Of course it did. I told it too.”
Apparently he can program it to say or call him what ever he chooses. I guess that would explain all the times I thought I was hearing things when in reality it really was his computer calling him “Oh Captian my Captian.” :eek:
He probably wishes he could program it to grovel before him :rolleyes:
Actually, it was an error message that popped up. By default the laptop says, “Excuse me…” and then proceeds to tell me what the error was. I thought that was boring, so I went in and decided to see if I can make it say something else. It now says:
“Your highness”
“O Captain, My Captain”
“Love muffin”
“Hey good lookin’”
“Sexy beast”
and “oogle boogle snorf”
(That last one was just to see if it would pronounce some nonsense words)
It was just part of the laptop when I got it. I don’t know what the application is or anything. I enrolled in school for graphics arts and part of my tuition went to a Mac laptop. It’s pretty sweet, but runs between $2000 and $3000. I’d tell you exactly what laptop it is, but I don’t have the booklet on me as I’m at the GFs house and not at thome.
If anyone knows where to get this, I must know. I would dearly love my computer to speak in a posh British accent… Plus it would piss my husband the scotsman off royally.
Fairly standard on Windows machines, too - you can associate a sound file with any of the standard system messages.
I decided the beep I got with every system error wasn’t interesting enough, so replaced it with a clip of Nicol Williamson in Excalibur, saying “You have broken … what could not BE broken!!!”
Small things amuse small minds, and this amused me.
I have had many of my system sounds replaced with custom sound clips (on a Windows XP machine, it’s really easy).
I eventually get tired of them and go back to simple sounds. One, however, will never get old. For new email, I get:
“Must… check… email!”
It’s Strong Bad, from www.homestarrunner.com. There are a number of system sounds with clips from the characters, as well as icons, for both Mac and PC.
IIRC, MacinTalk (the Mac’s text-to-speech software) has been around since 1984. I certainly remember my grandmother’s 128k Mac giving me spoken instructions when I played my little kiddie games on it.
Speech recognition for the Mac was released in (I think) System 7.0, but it’s kind of a hassle to set up and use. Unless, of course, you happen to be HRH King Crunchy of Frog.
