Tech Mania

iPhone OS 3.0 to have Voice recognition Posted: 22 Apr 2009 06:29 AM PDT There were some rumours that the upcoming iPhone OS 3.0 for Apple’s iPhone would feature Voice control support.So finally this  will come true.Arstechnica reports some evidence for it.Apparently a range of various voice-related features, codenamed “Jibbler“, will be included with the operating system currently in development. “Jibbler” will have a range of features, one of which will be voice recognition. A user could use the iPhone’s microphone, or a pair of Apple headphones with the same feature, to input voice and have Jibbler interpret it. Another feature that could be included alongside this is voice synthesis. This would be similar to what Apple’s most recent iPod Shuffle offers, but “the difference being that the iPhone hardware itself could handle real-time voice synthesis.” It’s hinted that Apple may also include these features in their official SDK, as there have been the following classes and methods found: “VSSpeechSynthesizer, VSRecognitionSession, SBVoiceControlDisableHandlerActions, SBSensitiveJibblerEnabled, and SBVoiceControlSoundCompletion. SB refers to SpringBoard, and VS likely refers to Voice Services.” It would be excellent to have a native ability to voice-dial a person as opposed to a application which does this feature.

Direct X 11 to offer shaders to DirectX 10 hardware Posted: 22 Apr 2009 02:12 AM PDT I just read some nice info on DirectX 11 and i thought i will just blog about this one.One of the most important features of DX11 compute shaders will be available for DX 10 and DX10.1 class graphics cards.General-purpose processing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) is gaining popularity slowly but will surely be gaining some momentum. At present there is only one standard application programming interface – OpenCL - that supports all graphics chips available today. But apparently, DirectX 11, which will enable GPGPU, physics, artificial intelligence, etc. programming via compute shaders, will also be able to take advantage of present GPUs, with some limitations though. The DirectX 11 includes not only compute shaders 5.0, but also compute shaders 4.0 (for Direct X10 hardware) and 4.1 (for DirectX 10.1 hardware), which are not supported by DirectX 10. Compute shaders 4.0/4.x have a number of limitations compared to version 5.0, including maximum number of threads per group (768), thread group shared memory (16KB vs. 32KB in CS 5.0), absence of atomic operations or append/consume and so on. CS 5.0 will also offer better interaction with graphics pipeline (e.g., it can output to textures), double precision and so on. The main aim of compute shaders 4.x is to allow game developers to practice with compute shaders technology, enable GPGPU via DirectX as well as let game developers to use CS for complex rendering-related tasks instead of pixel shaders so to gain performance.Beta version of DirectX 11 as well as drivers that support compute shaders 4.x are available  from Microsoft, ATI/AMD as well as Nvidia.If you want to download DirectX 11 for Vista and Windows 7 you can check out my previous post.

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