[From April 18] Speaking through a computer and wearing a newly designed facial prosthesis, Roger Ebert – who lost his voice and his jaw and nearly his life after a battle with cancer and a ruptured carotid artery – closed this year’s TED Conference, improbably, with a guffaw."A guy goes into into a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist says, 'You're crazy.' The guy says, 'I want a second opinion.' The psychiatrist says, 'All right, you're ugly, too.'"You didn’t even have to be there. Seriously, he adds: “if a computer can tell a joke and do the timing and delivery as well as Henny Youngman, then that’s the voice I want.” He calls it the “Ebert Test,” after Turing’s AI standard, and seems to have already found the winner: his MacBook.“Alex,” the standard voice included in the Mac OS software, does sound better than Hawking’s synthesized voice, and better, he says, than the voice ‘reconstructed’ for him last year by a Scottish company using sound clips from his previous television appearances – a prosthesis that proved too uncanny valley for him.Other Interviews with Ryan Trecartin – Alex from Sara Amido on Vimeo.This isn’t the only time Apple saved him. If he hadn’t been in the hospital when his cartoid ruptured, he says he almost certainly would have died. But he wasn’t supposed to be there: the reason he hadn’t yet left the hospital was because he was sharing Leonard Cohen's "I'm Your Man" with hospital staff staff on his iPod.(Sun Times)
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