via Techdirt by Michael Masnick on 1/6/09
theodp writes "Astronaut Dave Bowman may have found the HAL-9000 more believable had the Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer been equipped with the technology described in IBM's new patent for Generating paralinguistic phenomena via markup in text-to-speech synthesis. In the patent, IBM describes how you can dupe others into believing they're dealing with a real, live human being by using markup language to feign sadness, anger, laughter, filled pauses (uh, um), breaths, coughs and hesitations (mmm). Here's an example that shows how to make a more lovable HAL: <prosody style="bad news">I'm cough sorry Dave sigh, I'm afraid I can't do that.<prosody>"Permalink | Comments | Email This Story 