Henchmen as kittens… porn, yo?

Writing about old time radio programs at http://jheroes.com means a lot of transcribing from  mp3 files made by collectors over the years from tapes of even older transcription discs.  With my eyes bothering me on a recent morning, I decided to see whether Google’s Android voice recognition  could expedite the transcription process.

Could my Android phone “listen” to an old radio show and convert the dialogue to text? I tested the idea with the plot summary a couple of minutes into episode 6 of an “Adventures of Superman” story titled “Ruler of Darkness.” (See the “Ruler of Darkness” JHeroes.com entry.)

I admit it is not the most static-free recording in the Internet Archive collection, and background organ music probably put the voice recognition to an unfair test.

Here is my eventual (manual) transcription, followed by Android’s two unassisted tries, for your amusement. I’ve highlighted a few words that came out right… but I’m especially curious about the words that Android replaced with asterisks. Did it think the radio announcer said something naughty?

“And now The Adventures of Superman.
“When cub reporter Jimmy Olsen was seriously injured by henchmen of Mike Hickey, political boss of Metropolis, editor Perry White swore he would drive Hickey and his corrupt political machine out of power.
White opened an attack on Hickey in the Daily Planet and chose Joe Martin, war hero and brother of Beanie Martin, the Planet’s copy boy, to run for mayor against the machine candidate in the approaching election.
Enraged, Hickey swore he would nip this reform movement in the bud.”

Android 1.

No seriously injured my kitten or you could drive up with you so don’t want to be my wife definition of elections oregon live in the b*** status other joe wasn’t serious come on out free porn yo

Android 2.

Oh yeah you’re phone daniel seriously injured my kitten like 40 with drive she out of our over then so still want to be my stuff white directions great looking forward sleep well in the b*** account brother

Definitely room for improvement…

Footnote: The accurate transcription also was made with Google’s speech to text. I would listen to a phrase, press pause on the mp3 player, press record on my phone, then speak the phrase in a normal voice at conversational speed or a little slower. I discovered that I couldn’t read the dialogue at radio actor speed if I wanted to!

Finally, I edited the result to fix proper names, capitalization and a few words here and there. End result: My eyes were still tired and my thumb hurt.

But I’ll try again sometime with a more recent, slower-paced radio show. And I’ll do some homework about Android Speech-to-Text or “voice typing” — and  Android Text-To-Speech for good measure.

Verizon Wireless Hotspot Still Not So Hot

Update: VZWsupport folks at Twitter have been helpful, offering a different MiFi device, the Verizon Jetpack™ 4G LTE Mobile Hotspot MiFi® 4510L.

Quick look at customer reviews found “much better” comments from some users who upgraded from the Samsung I’ve had such problems with, but also many complaints about reliability, speed and battery life.

I’m asking about the possibility of switching the MiFi hotspot device account to a smartphone account, possibly a Droid Maxx, which has hotspot capability. Trying to get a price for that upgrade from Verizon phone support — operator said she’d call back after talking to supervisor. Irony: My phone’s battery ran out 80 minutes after the time she said she’d call.

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My Samsung Verizon MiFi hotspot continues to drop connections — sometimes several times in a half hour. (Other times it’s fine for several hours of uninterrupted service, but connection speed is wildly inconsistent.) This is increasingly annoying now that I’m working at home more between semesters.

Verizon has replaced it three times, but the most recent replacement was a refurbished unit and its connection speeds have been the worst I’ve had in a year, without much improvement in reliability of the connection, although I haven’t had another major outage like the ones in December.

The previous device’s connection speeds sometimes exceeded 15 M/bps between dropped connections. The replacement unit is all over the place, but never that fast. (Today’s samples at right.)

Symptom: The indicator lights on the device and the Airport connection icon on my MacBook don’t show a disconnection. The Mac shows full strength, four bars, but Web pages don’t load. There’s no error message other than the usual “this page is not available.” I’ve tried several browsers and three different Macs. The indicator on my Android tablet, however, sometimes does switch to orange showing that the connection has dropped — my cue to hit the “reset” button on the Samsung hotspot.

On the Mac, I’ve lost work in email, WordPress, Terminal ssh connections and “cloud” services as a result of the MiFi connection just disappearing, not to mention the hours of back-and-forth on the Verizon Wireless Support Twitter feed.

Three months ago I gave up after waiting for a “will phone you…” that never came. Now that the semester-workload crunch is over, maybe I’ll try again.

I have two Verizon accounts: One for my original Droid 3G phone — which does not allow me to “tether” a MacBook and go online the way I thought it would when I bought it, and the second for the MiFi hotspot, which became my main home and off-campus Internet access when I moved to a house not served by the city’s municipal wifi.

Six brief news writing tips — or are they?

Every semester I tell students in the introductory news writing class that the basics of writing in a news style will be useful in other types of writing.

Take this list, for example:

1. Keep it brief. Be concise, simple and precise…
2. Keep it simple… Use short words, active verbs, and common nouns.
3. Be friendly. Use contractions. Talk directly to the reader…
4. Put the most important thing first…
5. Describe only what’s necessary…
6. Avoid repetition.

Which Journalism 101 textbook did that come from?

Answer: None. It’s part of the “writing” section of Google’s design tips for developers of apps for Android phones.

The details of each step aren’t exactly what we tell news writers. With luck, journalists will be telling their stories on a larger canvas than a smartphone screen, and to an audience whose thumbs aren’t twitching for a return to Angry Birds. But good writing should work on both page sizes. News writers might think of themselves as designing a “user interface” for the information in their stories.

I especially like the ultra-conservative Android version of the “most important thing first” rule (emphasis added):  ”The first two words (around 11 characters, including spaces) should include at least a taste of the most important information in the string. If they don’t, start over.”

The old conclusion-first “inverted pyramid” news story’s summary lead emphasizes the first sentence. But the “two words” idea isn’t unique to Google. For online reading, usability experts with eye-tracking devices have been telling us for years that readers skim down through the start of each line. The “11 characters” reference leads me to believe that  Jakob Nielsen’s work is on someone’s desk (screen, bookmark list, bookshelf) at Google.

If nothing else, following that two-word rule might get beginning news-writing students to stop starting stories with the words “Last night…” — which could be the first two words of every morning-after story in a newspaper.

Verizon 4G stands “for grief”

Using a Verizon 4G LTE hotspot as my main Internet connection over semester break — and working on research “in the cloud” —  has been piling frustrations on frustrations. They look like the picture at the right.

An article at AndroidPolice.com is convincing about an “authentication” issue as the possible technical cause of 4G problems that have been plaguing me for months. Verizon has replaced my Samsung 4gLTE hotspot device twice and most recently also replaced the SIM card. In perhaps 10 calls to Verizon tech support, I’d never heard this “authentication” topic mentioned, but that article reads exactly like what’s happening, including why my old 3G Droid phone works even when the Samsung hotspot’s 4G/3G connection doesn’t. Quoting: 

This is what your 4G LTE UICC SIM card does – it’s responsible for authenticating you on both Verizon’s 3G and 4G networks. Verizon 3G-only phones use the old authentication system, because they don’t have these SIM cards… the new scheme is extremely particular about failed attempts to authenticate a device. Your device authenticates regularly, “checking in” with the network to ensure you’re still supposed to be connected. When your device fails to authenticate on the network (for any reason – and there are a gamut of possibilities)… you notice you no longer have a data connection, and throw your phone at the nearest wall.

So far, I haven’t tried throwing the hotspot at the wall. It’s so small and light that it would be more satisfying to skip it across the surface of a lake. If I had a lake handy, I’d be tempted. Even yesterday, with blogs and twitter feeds reporting a widespread Verizon 4G outage (the third this month), a Verizon tech support person still had me doing things like removing and replacing the SIM card, logging into the device itself from my browser (http://192.168.1.1/)  and waiting for long breaks while he, presumably, scratched his head and tried valiantly to look things up in a support database. Another hour of my life I’ll never get back.

While the Samsung 4G LTE hotspot was useless, my Droid 3G phone performed just fine all day. The  hotspot’s indicator lights sometimes said it was connected with 4G, sometimes with 3G, but my computers could never connect to any website, regardless of the configuration of blinky lights.

Most annoying: Do a Google search for “verizon 4g outage status” and notice how far down the search list you have to go to find anything at “verizon.com” or “vzw.com.”  For a communication company, Verizon doesn’t appear to be communicating with its own technical support staff or its customers. How about an honest “system status” page somewhere?

I did eventually discover these discussion forums, but they have been mostly speculation and questions, no answers:

• community.vzw.com 4G Network discussion
• community.vzw.com outage topic
• androidcommunity.com outage topic

UPDATE: On the 29th, Verizon Tweeted that the problem had been solved and posted a press release that didn’t explain the extent or cause of the outage. It blamed the several recent outages on different “triggering events,” and made no mention of the SIM/authentication issue.

On the day of the outage, there had been nothing useful from the Verizon PR folks, but enough about expansion of the system to make you wonder whether the problem was just a matter of trying to grow too fast:

• http://news.verizonwireless.com/LTE/Overview.html#PressReleases
• http://news.verizonwireless.com/news/2011/12/pr2011-12-27.html
• http://news.verizonwireless.com/news/2011/12/pr2011-12-14m.html
• https://twitter.com/#!/VZWnews on Thursday tweeted, “4GLTE issue resolved overnight. 3G operated normally; calling, texting were unaffected,” but didn’t say extent of “issue” or point out that 4G devices like mine did not connect to the 3G network.
• https://twitter.com/#!/VZWSupport seemed buried in inquiries about badly timed announcement of a new billing policy, (which was rescinded two days later)

Ironically, but not unexpectedly, my connection flaked out a couple of times while I was writing this post. One of the most annoying aspects is that the 4G LTE WiFi hotspot’s indicator lights always show a normal connection, my Mac’s Airport icon shows a normal connection, but any Web browser attempt to load a page results in a “This webpage is not available…” display like the one shown above on the right.

Today, turning the hotspot off, waiting a bit, turning it back on, and recovering this page from the WordPress cache did the job. (Kudos to the combination of Google Chrome and WordPress.com for saving work in the background.) Yesterday, I was trying to do some online shopping, connect with some friends by email, pay bills and do research. I lost half a day, not counting what I’ve wasted “venting” about this today. Mea culpa. It’s enough to send me looking for an older technology… maybe a pencil. One with “AT&T” or “T-Mobile” written on the side.