Rhetorical Question of the Week:

On bootup the venerable Johnny Weismuller gives the victorious Tarzan jungle song On Critcal Stop in Access r2d2 goes oooooooh and on emptying the trash bin an embedded mountain lion snarls. What are we listening to?

The CybrrCat's modified P5-166 CPU w/SoundBlaster!

Program your computer to talk to you and, hot off the presses, CD-ROM that is, now you can talk to your computer!

Sound files abound on the Internet: check out the list on the left for my personal bookmark collection of sounds. There are

• animal sounds--whales at the end of the list--
• old sitcoms-M-M-Max Headroom, The Roadrunner
• classical music-Tchaikovsky, Sibelius
• movie themes-Arnie's coolest one liners, Star Trek bridge commands
• tunes galore-Enya, classic 50s tunes, Garth Brooke, Beatles, Stone Temple Pilots

There are several different types of sound files used in different formats:

• .wav
• .MIDI, .mid
• .aiff file

For the Windows system you mostly want wav files, they are small files and recognized easily by Windows. Download these sounds as you would other assets and load them into:

C:\Windows\Media

(You will see other .wav files in this directory as well.)

Then, to program your computer with the new cool sounds, go to: START>SETTINGS>Control Panel>Sounds

Click on an event you want to associate a sound with, like opening a program and then in the selection window scroll through until you see the sound you want. Click on it and then preview the sound by clicking on the sound icon. Then when you have selected all the sounds you want for all the events, save it and name it something like *Sounds1*. This will save all the sounds as a unit or a *scheme* as Windows calls it. Later, if you like, you can create other sound schemes. Perhaps a different one for the office than you use at home so you can switch back and forth if you use a laptop in both places for example.

HAPPY HUNTING! Oh, and if you find some other cool sound sites, be sure to email me the URL and I'll add it to the list!

Talking to your Computer

Speech recognition (SR) apps are happening. And no. More. Pausing. Between. Each. Word. The software is now reasonably priced and just in time for those of us w/repetitive stress syndromes and carpal tunnel! Today's SR apps can decipher normal speech at a conversation rate and, even more, fine tune to identify your own voice.

CNET says, "The latest speech recognition technology analyzes the words you say; then compares what it hears with its voluminous list of stored word sounds. Continuous speech software takes on many guises- But the kind with the most sci-fi glitz, and the best shot at boosting productivity, is dictation software, which transforms the words you speak into text on the screen."

While players in speech recognition R&D; abound, including AT&T; and Microsoft, check out these three reviewed by CNET:

• Dragon Systems
• IBM
• Lernout & Hauspi