Saturday 5 November 2011

Testing new media

Over the last week or so I've been playing with a few gizmo's, and a few new ways of doing things (new to me anyway).
The first toy was a new video camera, which I hope to use to make videos of tournaments etc. I tested it out a Street Chess today, and you can see the results below.
While working on the editing of the piece (10 or so minutes down to 45 seconds), I ran across the speech recognition software that comes with Vista. It has been a couple of years since I did anything with speech recognition (I built a conversation system for a robot a few years back) but I thought I'd give it another shot. It seems to work ok, but what I tried to get it to do, is to input games into Chessbase by reading the scoresheet. Sadly this failed on two levels. The first is that I have yet to work out how to get the speech recognition system to understand basic phrases like "e2e4". The second is that Chessbase has very limited support for keyboard input, which is necessary to enter the moves from the speech recognition system.
The other area I've been investigating is Google+. In a sense this is just a different type of Facebook, but it has the benefit of not actually being Facebook. What I hope to use Google+ for is for simple video conferencing. It supports conferences of up to 10 people, which may make some of my chess admin work a little easier. I'm also keen to try and use it to do live tournament reports, as well as things like arbiter training.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A nice little movie. I wish I was there...

Henrik Mortensen