AT&T

YouTuber Mark Luton made this fun video to demo a free speech synthesizer, which you can try out here.

Here’s his background on the speech synthesizer:

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech; other systems render symbolic linguistic representations like phonetic transcriptions into speech.

Synthesized speech can be created by concatenating pieces of recorded speech that are stored in a database. Systems differ in the size of the stored speech units; a system that stores phones or diphones provides the largest output range, but may lack clarity. For specific usage domains, the storage of entire words or sentences allows for high-quality output. Alternatively, a synthesizer can incorporate a model of the vocal tract and other human voice characteristics to create a completely “synthetic” voice output.

The quality of a speech synthesizer is judged by its similarity to the human voice, and by its ability to be understood. An intelligible text-to-speech program allows people with visual impairments or reading disabilities to listen to written works on a home computer. Many computer operating systems have included speech synthesizers since the early 1980s.

Note that the free online speech synthesizer is an AT&T project and comes with a bunch of ridiculous restrictions - like not allowing the output to be used in videos like the one above.

AT&T hotspots are now offering free Wi-Fi access to iPhone users.

Barnes and Noble, Starbucks and presumably all of AT&T’s 71,000 hotspots are now offering iPhone users a custom portal to access free Wi-Fi. A special iPhone formatted page asks for your mobile phone number. Once entered, you can access the Wi-Fi access for free.

MacRumors has been able to confirm this finding at a local Barnes and Noble. Blurry photo provided:

AT&T recently partnered with Starbucks (displacing T-Mobile) to provide Wi-Fi access to Starbucks’ 7000 stores nationwide. This partnership allowed existing AT&T broadband customers free access and AT&T promised that it would “soon extend the benefits of Wi-Fi at Starbucks to its wireless customers”, but no official announcement has yet been made

Even better – this functionality is based on the iPhone’s user agent – which is easily imitated with the browser on your computer. This could be a nice bonus for musicians that have invested in Apple iPhones – and anybody that’s a bit of a geek.

We haven’t had a chance to give this a try yet. If you’re at one of AT&T’s 71,000 hotspots, give this a try and let us know how it works!