IKEA's online robotic assistant need some help

From today's conversation at IKEA.com with their automatic help person (illustrated as a redhead named Anna):

You said: I need to find replacement wheels for an office chair.

Anna said: There are many options for chair available on our catalogue. In order to narrow your search select one specific category from the ones listed on the window below me.

          Product types

          Product names

          Item colors

          Item price ranges

          Was this answer helpful?

You said: NO

Anna said: Sorry. As an IKEA Online Assistant I don't know the meaning of 'no'.

Now,  how are you supposed to answer a question like "Was this answer helpful?" Yes or no would be the most basic answers, right?  And as a computerized robot, yes/no, 1/0, would be the most basic, logical thing, clear and concise.  But Anna, the robot, does not know the meaning of 'no'.  Hilarious. And totally unhelpful of course.

Machine men

I know there are several visitors and contributors here who also are frequent listeners to audiobooks, so you might be interested in LibriVox.org. It is a project where people volunteer to read and record books in the public domain. The quality of the readings varies of course, but I found Thoreau's "Walden", read by Gord Mackenzie, to be very good.

I've been evaluating a few different speech synthesis systems lately, for the purpose to have articles read to me while I am on the go. I tried this a few years ago, but the systems available to me then failed to perform well. Sounded like Plåt-Niklas (Tin-Niklas, a robot from the children's books of "Grodan Boll").

I think I've found a working solution now with the voice "Peter", a distinguished british gentleman from Acapela Group, used in the application Ghostreader for Mac OS X. I haven't tried the new, supposedly very good, voice that comes with Mac OS X "Leopard" (10.5), but I don't think it or any other commercially available system (for decent money) can match the one under development I was demoed some time ago, which could read poetry better than some poets... It uses AI to try to figure out what it is reading and adjusts tone, speed and phrasing accordingly. We ran the script for "Pulp Fiction" through it and after a while it started to sound pretty pissed off! :)

Development of complex things was so much faster in 1927... (From Fritz Lang's "Metropolis")

Until that speech synthesis is released one can always listen to snippets of Tove Jansson read by Plåt-Niklas' swedish-speaking finnish cousin... ;)

/O.K.
(Listening to while posting: Noisy computer fans)

We are the robots

Craziness from Japan. Where else would this sport emerge?
I love how serious the referee is.



How is the Lego Mindstorms building going, LA?

/O.K.
(Listening to while posting: RWPL - The gentle art of swimming)