Softwares
What happened to Loquendo, that canned voice that Spanish-speaking youtubers turned into an Internet phenomenon
In these times in which so many applications and platforms receive names in English or derived from it, ‘Loquendo’ is, on the contrary, a word derived directly from the Latin: it is the gerundive (future participle) of the verb ‘loquor’ (to speak), and can be translated as ‘what will be spoken’ or ‘what is speakable’. But don’t worry, the beginning of this story does not go back to Julius Caesar and Cicero, but only to the mid-70s. Although, yes, it is also located in Italy.
It was then that the CSELT (Centro Studi e Laboratori Telecomunicazioni), a research institution in Turin attached to the Institute for Industrial Reconstrution of Italy, created the first highly intelligible speech synthesizer capable of speaking (and singing) Italiancalled MUSE (MUltichannel Speaking Automaton), which used diphones (vowel and consonant combinations) pre-recorded to synthesize voices. The first practical application of it was to create the voices for the musical album ‘La voce del calcolatore’ (computer voice), released in 1978. And if you’re wondering… yes, we’ve come a long way since then:
That technology, however, became the basis for much more refined applications released during the 1990s, also by the CSELT, as ‘ELOQUENS’ or ‘ACTOR’. Finally, in 2001, Telecom Italia (successor to CSELT) created crazy as a commercial company intended to exploit all this speech synthesis technology. At that time, the new company was developing multiple tools for both home users and large call center servers.
The loquenders arrive
It would still be five years before, on May 22, 2006a user called ‘fingazzz’ (a Valencian named Mateo, who proclaims himself on Twitter “Father of loquenderos until proven otherwise”) uploaded to an almost newly created YouTube the first ‘loquender’ video in history, which immediately became a viral hit and started the fever for this kind of content. We are talking, of course, about ‘Still Dorito’:
A few months later, another Spanish user (MrCoucou) started a fashion that would eventually generate thousands of videos on YouTube, the video reviews with Loquendo. The funniest thing is that many users still took a while to find out where that characteristic voice that seemed to be present on multiple YouTube channels came from… even when youtubers began to add the word ‘Loquendo’ to the title or description of their videos , many comments implied that they thought he was a voice actor.
When it became clear what Loquendo was and what it allowed to be done, this phenomenon of videos with Loquendo, initially 100% Spanish, expanded with great success to Latin Americawhere it became fashionable to use this voice synthesis software to publish criticisms (when not mere successions of insults) against all kinds of groups (otakus, reggaeton, emos…).
The English Wikipedia itself stands out, despite the existence of successful English-speaking ‘loquenders’ such as loquendointeractivethat “Loquendo’s voice synthesis has become an Internet meme on YouTube, although it is more common in Spanish language videos“.
The most viewed videos in the history of YouTube that mention ‘Loquendo’
After that first wave of ‘loquenders’, another wave would arrive in 2009 focused on the publication parodic dubbing of gameplays, preferably from the game ‘Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’), as well as anime reviews. Around this time, most of these dubbings were created using the free application TextAloud, which made it possible to synthesize speech from text.
Today it is possible to use a few seconds of recording of any voice and have an AI synthesize it
The ‘cracked’ packs of TextAloud and Loquendo voices were all the rage for a while…
Global interest in Loquendo peaked between the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012., more or less at the time when Telecom Italia decided all its shares in Loquendo to Nuance, a company specializing in OCR and speech recognition systems that, a decade later, would end up being acquired by Microsoft. Nuance would close its doors in 2022, so Loquendo’s speech synthesis tools are now part of Microsoft’s portfolio of Technologys, just like other tech legends like Windows and Clippy.
Worldwide searches for Loquendo since 2004.
Softwares
If your screen goes black in Windows 10 and 11, this command will save you from rebooting
Operating systems aren’t perfect, and Windows is no exception. Day by day many errors are reported, such as the inability to boot the computer with Windows 11 and also sometimes it can happen that the desktop suddenly appears black rendering the computer unusable.
This fact is characterized by the disappearance of all the icons on the desktop and the taskbar. This is because ‘Explorer’ process stops suddenly due to unexpected problem without generating any visual error. But there are ways to reverse it in a very simple way, although at first it seems that nothing can be done with the computer.
WINDOWS 10: 9 VERY USEFUL AND LITTLE-KNOWN TRICKS
A simple command that can save your computer
Although the Windows interface seems to have disappeared, the truth is that you will be able to continue using your computer. To do this you simply have to press the keys Control + Shift + Escape. The task manager will automatically open where all the processes that are running as well as the main programs that are active at that moment will be displayed.
What is interesting in this window is to press Run new task. You will see that a dialog box opens where you can enter a text next to the word “Open”. Specifically, you will have to write “Explorer.exe” and then click on Accept. At the moment, Windows Explorer should be run again and therefore the taskbar and icons will appear on the desktop. This window can also be opened pressing Windows + R.
It should be noted that this trick will only work when everything is black but if the mouse appears. In the event that nothing is visible, it is likely that the error resides in a hardware component such as the graphics card or RAM memory, and it can even be a bug in the operating system. In these cases, it is recommended to restart the device.
Another solution that can be considered if the taskbar works is to enter Start and search for the term REGEDIT, clicking on the first option found. Among all the folders that appear, follow the path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWinlogon. Finally, in the list of elements on the right, you will have to click on Shell and write the word explorer.exe. From here the process will be loaded as in the previous case.
Via | @rafatatay
Softwares
so you can enjoy its contents
ARTE.tv is the Free European cultural streaming platform that offers content in several languages. Now prepare the launch of the second edition of ArteKino Classics in a few days, during the month of March. It is a public television initiative that brings together European films shot between 1945 and 1995.
The collection will soon be available online throughout Europe on ARTE.tv and in the ART applications for smartphones and Smart TV, with subtitles in six languages, also Spanish. The platform languages are: French, German, English, Polish, Italian and Spanish.
It must be remembered that there is another similar platform in Spain called ‘Somos cine’, created by RTVE. It is a website that allows you to see more than 300 Spanish films. In addition to presenting a large number of films, the catalog also stands out in qualityWell, as RTVE itself points out, there are Goya-winning films such as ‘Campeones’, ‘Snow White’, ‘Living is easy with your eyes closed’, ‘Truman’ or ‘Juliet’.
How ARTE.tv works
You can access the web, in Spanish, and you can easily see the content it offers. Remember that most content comes from Germany and France, which translates to seeing you will access movies, series or biographies originating in these countries. But there are also Spanish documentaries with titles such as the position of citizens towards bullfights, the crisis of the working class, octopus fishing or places like the island of La Gomera.
A section that is given special interest in this European website is equality, with programs that give visibility to the challenges that women constantly face due to gender or sex issues, such as testimonies from women about the fear of returning home alone, about the rapes they have suffered or about abortion. There are also programs on the situation of women in other parts of the world such as Iran.
The war in *text muted*, which is now one year old, also has special attentionas well as the rights of LGTBIQ people+. There is an exclusive section on politics and society and another on psychology.
As for movies you have, above all, short films, with titles like ‘The black bear’, ‘Wild love’, ‘Bad Bunny’ or “He, who has two souls”. There is also ‘Grandma’s Sex Life’, which holds the title of Best European Short Film 2022 about the intimate memories of an older woman that illustrates the condition of Slovenian women at the beginning of the s. xx.
There is another section of European series like ‘Loulou’, ‘Metro Veinte’ or the Ukrainian ‘Mama’. You also have dozens of cultural documentaries.
What is ArteKino Classics
This is a project financed from the European Union. ArteKino Classics, which is now launching its second edition, was born almost a year ago under the premise that “the Europe’s film heritage it is a cultural treasure of astonishing diversity” and it is hoped that many works can reach all the citizens of the continent.
This brings together both well-known classics and movies who are remarkable for their vision of the worldtheir cinematography or their performances.
Among what you can already find on ARTE.tv you have: about 56% of the programming are documentaries; 19%, motion pictures and fiction; 14%, informative programs; and 5%, music and live shows. Two thirds of the channel’s programs are unpublished.
ART negotiates the rights of all these programs to be able to present to users outside of France and Germany an increasingly abundant offer. If, for some reason, ARTE does not have the international rights for the video you are about to watch, the following message will appear: “This video is not available in your country.”
Softwares
This nun created the BASIC language (and became the first PhD in computing) 24 years after entering the convent
Although few people know it, June 7, 1965 was a very important day in the history of computing: that day the first two doctoral degrees in Computer Science were awarded of history (not that there weren’t experts in the field before that, of course). The first, by the University of Washington, went to Irving C. Tang, while—just a few hours later, at the University of Wisconsin—the second went to a woman: Sister Mary Kenneth Keller.
Keller, born into an Irish-Catholic family, had entered in 1932 (with 19 years) in the congregation of Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dubuque, Iowa. After 8 years as a novice, she took her vows in 1940 and began teaching mathematics in congregational schools.
And after that, he began his academic career in the academic field, earning a degree in Mathematics in 1943 (which allowed him to start teaching secondary school students) and a master’s degree in Mathematics and Physics in 1945.
Thus, when his religious order founded Clarke University in 1964, it became the first small university to offer a computer science degree in the US. At the head of said title, as director of the Department of Technology was, of course, our protagonist. She would be her director for two decades, until a few months before her death in 1985.
It was a few months after her appointment as director when, having already turned 52, she was awarded her doctorate by his thesis “Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns”focused on the development of algorithms capable of performing an analytical differentiation on the algebraic expression.
For some strange reason, Barbara Liskov (creator of the CLU and Argos languages) is often cited as the first female PhD in computing, despite receiving her degree three years after Sister Keller.
Staunch defender of the accessibility of computing to non-specialized users
The programming language that she used in the algorithms proposed in her thesis was the -even today- famous FORTRAN… despite the fact that a year before she herself had become one of the three creators of another language called to be even more popular than that one : the “Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code”, better known as BASIC.
In 1958, Dartmouth College had decided breaking her ‘male only’ rule (current for 188 years) to allow Keller in as a researcher for its Computer Center, where she began collaborating with John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz. From this collaboration arose the original dialect of BASIC (known as Dartmouth BASIC), of which her male colleagues are often cited as the sole creators.
What moved Kemeny, Kurtz, and Keller to consider creating BASIC was the need to allow students to write programs on time-sharing systems, systems that for the first time were open to users outside the computing area itselfwho needed power relatively easy to programalthough that would sacrifice some of the performance of the program.
Sister Keller was one of the earliest and most enthusiastic advocates of apply computing to the teaching of all areas of knowledge (an idea fully accepted today, but controversial at the time), which involved guaranteeing its accessibility at a time when it was still enormously expensive:
“We are experiencing an information explosion, and it is obvious that information will not be useful unless it is accessible.”
“For the first time we can now mechanically simulate the cognitive process. We can carry out studies on artificial intelligence. Furthermore, the computer can be used to help humans learn.”
“In the future, the number of those who will study this subject will increase, and as a consequence, the importance of teachers will also increase.”
As a consequence of this conviction, it was also co-founder in 1967 of the ASCUE (Association Supporting Computer Users in Education), promoting the use of computers in education. And, of course, she publicly endorsed, both by word of mouth and by his example, the presence of women in computer science.
Keller also performed a very current prediction in these times marked by the prominence of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligences:
“For the first time, we can simulate the cognitive process in a mechanical way. We can do studies on artificial intelligence. Beyond this, this mechanism (the PC) can be used to help humans learn. Over time we will have more students and more mature, so it is likely that this type of teaching will gain importance.
Via | Acton Institute
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