Unholy Creation
October 26th, 2006 by 
lorne
The technical challenges in making The Conversation Piece a reality are enormous. On the hardware side, it needs to be small, powerful, and attractive – things computers generally, well, aren’t.
On the software side, it’s even more miserable: speech recognition, text-to-speech, internet connectivity, and some kind of yet-to-be-invented “topic-jisting” AI. Worse than all that though, it’s got to be dead simple. No setup, no updates, no GUI, and definitely no BSOD – “grandma” (god bless her) has never even heard of it, and I want to keep it that way.
The project is already well underway so thankfully most of these problems have a solution. The hardware for the prototype will be an old laptop donated by teammate Tanya. I pulled it apart a few weeks ago, and found myself with this unholy creation:
Tanya and Nate will be figuring out how to mount that into a picture frame, while I concentrate on the software. More to come on that.
