A question for the lindens about speech...

Cory noted in his Town Hall in a question about speech:

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cruiser Gilman: Any more work on speech?
Cory Linden: cruiser: just experiments. The PARC folks were actually intrigued with some of the ideas, but it currently has much lower priority than bug and stability fixes, plus rendering/frame rate improvements.
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Now, in my mind, PARC is a bunch of sweet geeky scientist guys that sit around and make extremely cool stuff, just for the sake of research and science (as opposed to profit).

Their stuff is pretty extraordinairy, at the least.

Therefore, two questions.

1) What, exactly, are you guys doing over there with speech? Last I heard you were just fiddling with speech maskers, which if I'm not mistaken is pretty mundane...

2) If the PARC folks are intrigued with that, what ELSE are you guys brewing over there? Are you guys also a "sweet, geeky scientist" research company?

LF

Cory posted a blog entry about his discussion with PARC.

(1) Speech technology in intriguing but it is distant future for us (year or more) so we're not working on that ourselves. There are several groups working on this elsewhere, and the VOIP movement will help drive it. When it is feasible we'll look into rolling it into SL.

(2) It's real easy to dream up cool, fun, interesting features that SL should have. Implementing them always takes longer than listing them down. For example... consider the physics engine (which could keep me busy for the rest of my life): real fluid water (and air) and fracturable objects. Those won't be done for the next two years at least, but we've already got a fast 2-D fluid solver (that I wrote back in 2000) and we once did breakable primitives (back in alpha) but we turned that off a long time ago. We try to keep LL a fun place to work. If we run out of software ideas there is always the hardware project.

*Wiggles his fingers around and makes some wonkey eye gestures.*
Hardware project...