Listen To Woz, And Perhaps Type Madly

Shawn King of The Mac Show Live talked a few days ago with Apple co-founder and knowledge-omnivore Steve (The Woz) Wozniak. Shawn graciously agreed to post the interview, formerly Quicktime only (downloadable or streaming), as an MP3 file -- so now most anyone can listen. This is an interview worth listening to: Woz talks about his lifelong motivations, his years with Apple (up to the present), OS X, the Newton, and what the future holds for him. He also talks about building TV jammers and the only prank he got caught for in high school, one which might not fly so well right now. (The interview starts about 55 minutes into the show, and lasts for nearly an hour.) What's this got to do with typing madly? Well, since Shawn's program is all-audio (no pictures, and only the barest explanitory text), it's a lot less useful to those on text-only or just-plain-slow links than it could be. Read on below for your chance to change that with just a few minutes of your time. Update: 10/20 20:43 GMT by T : Thanks to everyone who's volunteered to transcribe, and to the several alternates who are already in line! No need for more voluneers right now :)

Transcribing an hour of text takes a long time. But if you (yes, you!) are willing to transcribe a 3-minute (well. 3:15) chunk of this interview, I will spend my putative day off gluing chunks of interview together. Shoot me an email with "WozScript" in the subject if you'd like to participate, and I'll give the first volunteers (it shouldn't take that many) a randomly-drawn three-minute segment to type up, as well as more instructions on how to format it. No compensation except your name in lights, and the knowledge that lynx users everywhere appreciate your efforts. I'll update this story if and when the transcription is complete. (And if anyone can suggest a good Quicktime audio --> .ogg converter, Shawn and I would both appreciate it.)

Suggestions

[Anonymous Coward]

A) Go from the mp3 to a high-quality ogg file. There are plenty of mp3-->ogg converters. And don't bitch about the quality, it's a freaking interview, notMozart.

B) On a related note, this would be a fascinating job for a text-to-speech editor. I say, slap the
entire interview through one, and then just edit. I'll bet it takes less than half the time.

Woz on Digital Village Radio

[Anonymous Coward]

Woz was on Digital Village [digitalvillage.org] last week for the full hour. A good interview, especially his thoughts about M$.

Re:Need more Mice Buttons

[BOFslime]

interstingly.. though off toppic.. OS X nativly supports 3 button scroll wheel mice.

mmm... contextual menus..

Time index of interview

[cDarwin]

The interview with Woz starts at T = 55:27

Re:Suggestions

[damiam]

Use Qucktime Pro [apple.com], export to a .wav file, then encode the .wav as an ogg.
Or, if you're looking for an open source solution, try using Quicktime for XMMS [sourceforge.net] or other Quicktime players for Linux, redirecting the sound to a .wav file, and then encoding into Ogg.

The Woz

[Ace905]

I actually found some info on the Woz [eggforge.net] just the other day. I thought it was kinda cool, but the same thing he discusses on his website.

Eggplants! [eggforge.net]

Another Interview

[dbCooper0]

can be found at The Guardian's Article [guardian.co.uk] that I got off Woz' site [woz.org].

Plenty of other references on Steve's site, as well...

Re:As I Listen...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardware-wise, Commodore's VIC-20 and C64 were mostly the effort of Bob Yannes. He left CBM soon after that to found Ensoniq, to implement the audio hardware that because of time constraints he only partially managed to cram in the C64's SID (which at the time was anyway the best audio processor for a home computer, making a lot of memorable music possible). Ensoniq was recently bought by Creative.

sphinx: free GPL-incompatible(?) speech recognizer

[Adam J. Richter]

At LinuxWorld in San Francisco, Geoff Harrison (sp?), co-author of the Enlightenment window manager, talked about text/speech conversion. If I recall his talk correctly, most proprietary voice recognition software is derived from the free sphinx [cmu.edu] system developed at Carnegie-Mellon University, which also has a sourceforge area [cmu.edu]. The web page at CMU talks about a sphinx3 program that is slower but more accurate, which sounds like a better fit for transcribing a previously recorded interview, but I did not see a link to the source code for it.

Geoff's employer, Cepstral [cepstral.com], also claims to have released [cepstral.com] some related software under "relatively liberal" permissions. (Sorry, I could not find any download links or texts of the corresponding copying permissions.)

The sphinx2 copying permissions have an advertising restriction similar to the one that made the old BSD copying conditions GPL incompatible but "free" [fsf.org] in the opinion of the Free Software Foundation. I do not know about the situtation with sphinx, sphinx3 or any Cepstral contributions.

Correction on sphinx2 sourceforge link

[Adam J. Richter]

Sorry, I thought I checked all of my links. The sphinx2 sourceforge links should be http://sourceforge.net/projects/cmusphinx/ [sourceforge.net].