some one asked recently if anyone had gotten Freedom Box to work:
Message-ID: <[log in to unmask]>

Here's a very preliminary minimal report.

We got it to work on a 1 gig HP machine using the built in microphone.

It will quite happilly load multiple itterations of its self if
you get impatiend waiting for it to load.  It does not check to
see if some version of its self is allready running before
loading.  Listening to that obnoxious woman's voice is bad enough
once, multiple times is only good for howling.

You can not scroll through lists or menus.  You must either
listen to an entire menu or make a selection when you hear the
one you want.

Speech recognition is not too bad on messages or words it has in
its selections, but when trying to speak an email address letter
at a time, it failed absolutely to get it even close after
multiple tries with two speakers.

About the only selection from the main menu which worked at all
well was weather, even then we had to speak the zip code twice.

The digitized audio recordings are slow, too much base, and
obnoxious and condescending in the extreme.  The mix of
synthesized voice and digitized audio is at dramatically
different levels and the contrast is confusing even to those who
are very used to a variety of audio sources.

Of course the number of crashes is not even to be considered.

Luckilly they have a 30 day demo, if I'd paid for this not ready
for prime time thing I'd have ben really upset.

All that mess and a subscription service too boot.

Under no circumstances should this mess be expected to be used by a new computer
user.

Separate and unequal is not access.

tom Fowle


Net-Tamer V 1.12.0 - Registered


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