karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) (12/03/88)
OK, so the nExt has got voice mail, right? Well, our favorite machine can do it too. All Amigas ever sold are capable of playing back voice mail. Cheap digitizers exist. Perfect Sound comes with source code, tho' copyrighted and caveat-laden. Anyway, it shouldn't be too tough to cook up a digitizer interface that's ordered a bit more towards recording voice mail that then Fibonacci delta compresses, uuencodes and mails it via UUPC to some destination. A cool hack, eh? I'd like to work on it but I have No Spare Time. -- -- "We've been following your progress with considerable interest, not to say -- contempt." -- Zaphod Beeblebrox IV -- uunet!sugar!karl, Unix BBS (713) 438-5018
paleo@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Constantine A. LaPasha) (12/04/88)
In article <3044@sugar.uu.net>, karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) writes: > OK, so the nExt has got voice mail, right? Well, our favorite machine can > do it too. All Amigas ever sold are capable of playing back voice mail. > Cheap digitizers exist. Perfect Sound comes with source code, tho' [[...good stuff omitted...]] > -- uunet!sugar!karl, Unix BBS (713) 438-5018 Sure we can do voice mail, but even with compression (mentioned above but removed in overzealous editing) - will voice mail cause a LARGE increase in net bandwidth problems? Will the actual voice recording add anything to the mailing beyond the text rendition, especially considering the extra bandwidth required to move the stuff? Further, do you really want to hear those flames in person? [C[C[C[C[C[C[C[C[C[C[C[C[C[C[C[C[C ^^^^^^ ^^^^ Maybe we should add video mail (:-) ... anim files of digitized sequences... nah, I'm not sure if I could handle looking at this bunch (:-). -- ===================================================================== Kostya LaPasha paleo@uncecs.edu or paleo@ecsvax.uncecs.edu === NCSU takes no responsibility for anything above === ==================... beware of root nematodes ...==================
karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) (12/05/88)
In article <6030@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>, paleo@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Constantine A. LaPasha) writes: > Sure we can do voice mail, but even with compression (mentioned above > but removed in overzealous editing) - will voice mail cause a LARGE > increase in net bandwidth problems? Will the actual voice recording > add anything to the mailing beyond the text rendition, especially > considering the extra bandwidth required to move the stuff? Granted, voice mail has higher bandwidth requirements -- much higher. I would not recommend people doing much voice mail on the net. Within the office, over the LAN, or from your house to my house, however, I think it could be valid. Including voice messages on disks along with other stuff would be another possible use. A 6K/sec sample rate is adequate, for sure, because I've tried it. Perhaps five would be OK. Anyway, 8 bits per sample, Fibonacci delta compression reduces that to four. (I have a variant of Fib I call "Wraparound Fibonacci delta compression" that reduces compression-induced distortion while maintaining the 50% compression rate. Email for details if you can't figure it out from the name.) OK, so that's 3K bytes/second using a not-super-bright compression algorithm. For a fifteen second message that's 45K bytes, about 3 minutes at 2400 baud, but less than a minute at 9600, half a minute on a Trailblazer and maybe 1/10 second on a LAN. The idea is, though, that voice mail is supposed to be one of the super-hot new features of the Next (I'm going to stop auto-advertising it by typing the name as NeXT) yet an Amiga can be outfitted to do it for about $75 for the digitizer plus a modem, bringing the entry-level Amiga voicemail system in for about one tenth the price of a Next. (a smiley goes here, they're not the same I know, the Next is awesome, but it's mono, it's not realtime, you can't buy one, and newly announced Amiga hardware is giving the Amiga many of the same capabilities) >Maybe we should add video mail (:-) ... anim files of digitized >sequences... nah, I'm not sure if I could handle looking at this >bunch (:-). This is actually a pretty great idea! It would be nice to have an easy means of tagging ILBM's into mail messages. There's this expensive Mitsubishi video phone at Sharper Image that lets you transmit an image of yourself. You press a button, it digitizes a pretty low res mono image of you and modems it across your voice connection for a few seconds. They can print too. This is kind of the uucp equivalent, plus it's what the user interface should look like. Of course you usually wouldn't send an ANIM that went along with your voice -- most Ami video digitizers don't run that fast. But you could send a little ILBM of yourself when appropriate. And people complain about long .signatures now! :-) -- -- "We've been following your progress with considerable interest, not to say -- contempt." -- Zaphod Beeblebrox IV -- uunet!sugar!karl, Unix BBS (713) 438-5018
paleo@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Constantine A. LaPasha) (12/05/88)
In article <3051@sugar.uu.net>, karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) writes: > In article <6030@ecsvax.uncecs.edu>, paleo@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Constantine A. LaPasha) writes: > > Sure we can do voice mail, but even with compression (mentioned above > > but removed in overzealous editing) - will voice mail cause a LARGE > > increase in net bandwidth problems? Will the actual voice recording > > Granted, voice mail has higher bandwidth requirements -- much higher. > I would not recommend people doing much voice mail on the net. Within > the office, over the LAN, or from your house to my house, however, I > think it could be valid. Including voice messages on disks along with [compression stuff removed] > > The idea is, though, that voice mail is supposed to be one of the super-hot > new features of the Next (I'm going to stop auto-advertising it by typing the > name as NeXT) yet an Amiga can be outfitted to do it for about $75 for the > -- uunet!sugar!karl, Unix BBS (713) 438-5018 Right! The Amiga can do it now, and lots cheaper too. With the folks programming on the Amiga, the compression business should be taken care of as well as possible. My major concern was that the folks pushing the nexT box (neet machine but I would want different capabilities for the $$) tout the voice mail thing for LONG DISTANCE public net based mail, not just local stuff. I think it's a great idea locally, or on diskettes, but I'm not sure if we need this on nation wide, and international net distribution. Since these nExt guys are targeting academic institutions, and they say how wonderfull it would be to send voice by mail back and forth accross the country, who's going to pay (:-). I haven't seen too many deep pockets around lately. Although mentioned originally in jest (partly), video mail might also be useful if used judiciously. But, this too has the potential for bandwidth troubles (for large scale nets). -- ===================================================================== Kostya LaPasha paleo@uncecs.edu or paleo@ecsvax.uncecs.edu === NCSU takes no responsibility for anything above === ==================... beware of root nematodes ...==================
rminnich@super.ORG (Ronald G Minnich) (12/06/88)
In article <6031@ecsvax.uncecs.edu> paleo@ecsvax.uncecs.edu (Constantine A. LaPasha) writes: >Since these nExt guys are targeting academic institutions, and they >say how wonderfull it would be to send voice by mail back and forth Ok, here ya go. Somebody posted the specs of next voice mail on comp.sys.next a little while ago, with a sample. Pull that message off, and that is your test case. Use that to get your amiga Next voice mail working. Then, start sending voice mail to comp.sys.next that says: Voice mail for $73? Only on an amiga. Gosh, that would be fun ... ron P.S. Until some person somewhere maybe sues you for using a NeXT standard on a non-NeXT machine? ... Naaaaaaaahhhhhh .... nobody's ever done anything like THAT.
scott@applix.UUCP (Scott Evernden) (12/07/88)
In article <3044@sugar.uu.net> karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) writes: >OK, so the nExt has got voice mail, right? Well, our favorite machine can >do it too. All Amigas ever sold are capable of playing back voice mail. Hmm. Saved to SPEAK: and my Amiga voicemail is functioning just fine... (-:scott
mark@xrtll.UUCP (Mark Vange) (12/13/88)
onsider if you would the problem of understanding that which is
sampled at 46K by one of the inexpensive samplers available right
now. By the time it is compressed, (with the inherent loss of
quality), and accouting for the many different accents (both
regional and linguistic) the voice mail system may be something less
than useful, at the very least requiring a transcript along with the
voice message. Surely there are better uses for phone time than
transs{erring unintelligable 20 second audio clips!scotty@ziggy.UUCP (Scott Drysdale) (12/15/88)
In article <227@xrtll.UUCP> mark@xrtll.UUCP (Mark Vange) writes: > >onsider if you would the problem of understanding that which is >sampled at 46K by one of the inexpensive samplers available right >now. By the time it is compressed, (with the inherent loss of consider that every time you use the phone you're listening to stuff that was sampled at 8Khz, 8 bits (companded of course). can you say DS1? --Scotty
mikeb@tikal.Teltone.COM (Mike Balch) (12/16/88)
In article <142@ziggy.UUCP> scotty@ziggy.UUCP (Scott Drysdale) writes: >consider that every time you use the phone you're listening to stuff that >was sampled at 8Khz, 8 bits (companded of course). can you say DS1? Voice information sampled at 8Khz with 8 bits resilution is really the DS0 level. DS1 is 24 DS0 chaneels plus framing adding up to 1.554Mhz.
mark@xrtll.UUCP (Mark Vange) (12/22/88)
Distribution: Organization: Mindless Blundering Keywords: In article <142@ziggy.UUCP> scotty@ziggy.UUCP (Scott Drysdale) writes: >In article <227@xrtll.UUCP> mark@xrtll.UUCP (Mark Vange) writes: >> >>onsider if you would the problem of understanding that which is >>sampled at 46K by one of the inexpensive samplers available right >>now. By the time it is compressed, (with the inherent loss of > This was actually supposed to read 4-6K, and I can only chalk this up to line noise or equivalent on my end...sorry. Mark Vange Visionary Design Technologies
karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer) (09/30/89)
In article <1989Sep26.035842.18131@i-core.UUCP> pete@i-core.UUCP (Pete Ashdown) writes: >Has anyone thought of doing voice-mail on the Amiga? >...something similar >to the NeXT's voice-mail. I remember reading that it only uses 8 bit samples >at something like a 20 khz sampling rate. Actually the sampleing rate is more like 6 Khz. You are correct that they're 8-bit. All the pieces for the code to create and email voice messages are there on the Amiga. Without writing any code you could use a sampler to create an IFF 8SVX file, uuencode it, and use UUPC or GNU uucp or somesuch to email it around. (I use UUPC all the time and it works fine. You can email me on my Amiga, it's karl@snoc.hackercorp.com) The file you sent would be nonstandard in the sense that Next machines couldn't play it (it'd be an IFF 8SVX file). The source code to the interface program used to come with Perfect Sound, it might still. You could get 'hold of that or somesuch and write up a cool program to do this. Use Fibonacci delta compression to get the rate down to 3 KB/sec. Compress blank spots too, but try to get Next's format I guess. >It would probably be more of a >novelty than anything else because of the size of the packets, but it still >would be pretty cool. It'd be OK on a LAN or for local calls (especially w/high speed modems), but the net (especially the UUCP part) is not ready to have substantial amounts of this stuff emailed about. -- -- uunet!sugar!karl "There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that -- flags do not wave in a vacuum." -- Arthur C. Clarke -- Usenet access: (713) 438-5018
aozer@next.com (Ali Ozer) (10/03/89)
In article <4250@sugar.hackercorp.com> Karl Lehenbauer writes: .In article <1989Sep26.035842.18131@i-core.UUCP> Pete Ashdown writes: ..Has anyone thought of doing voice-mail on the Amiga? .....something similar to the NeXT's voice-mail. I remember reading that ..it only uses 8 bit samples at something like a 20 khz sampling rate. . .Actually the sampleing rate is more like 6 Khz. You are correct that they're .8-bit. Actually it is 8kHz (8012.821 Hz), using 8-bit mu-law encoding. Ali
martens@python.cis.ohio-state.edu (Jeff Martens) (09/23/90)
In article <22153@grebyn.com> ckp@grebyn.UUCP (Checkpoint Technologies) writes: [ ... ] >The NeXTstation has a microphone and the DSP has a digitizer; this is >specifically to support their voice mail. [ ... ] When the NeXt first came out, I remember concern about voice mail clogging internet, based on the presumption that a given piece of voice mail will be much larger than the equivalent (in number of words, anyway) ASCII mail file. Any comments? -- -- Jeff (martens@cis.ohio-state.edu) Currently popular among Iraqi tank commanders: little yellow signs proclaiming "Child on board."