Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



You are here: Home / Archives for Web and Technology / Computers

Ultra Hal – make your computer talk and understand commands

by

Did you hear the news? Ultra Hal, created by Zabaware, won the grand prize for “most human” computer of the year – this means that they’ve basically created the Smartest artificial intelligence software ever. The award was given out at the 17th annual Loebner Prize Competition for Artificial Intelligence.

Their software gives your computer a personality with the ability to speak and understand the English language. Of course this means that when talk to your computer it really can talk back!

If you’d like to try the Ultra Hal Assistant 6.1 software you can download a free 30 day trial at the Zabaware website.

Zabaware’s Ultra Hal software won the “most human” computer of the year in the 17th annual Loebner Prize Competition for Artificial Intelligence (AI). The contest was held in New York City hosted by philanthropist Hugh Loebner.

The Loebner Prize is an annual competition where software programs attempt to convince human judges that they are actually people. The format of the competition is called a Turing Test. In a Turing Test a judge talks with 2 “entities” simultaneously through a text-based instant messaging system. One entity is a human and the other is a computer. It is up to the judge to decide which is which by typing questions to both entities and receiving answers.

Zabaware is an Erie, Pennsylvania based company that specializes in artificial intelligence technology. The company’s mission “giving your computer the power of thought” once considered a futuristic pipe dream is becoming a 2007 reality.

It is one thing to talk to your computer it is quite another to have a conversation where you are exchanging information and the computer learns and utilizes the information in the future. Zabaware’s Ultra Hal technology and its associated brain are currently doing just that. The software can give your computer a personality using AI technology, speech recognition technology, and real-time animation. It can be used as an entertainment program, a companion, or an office assistant. It learns from conversations and evolves and improves the more it talks with a person. In addition to chat it can perform useful functions such as remembering and reminding of appointments, keeping an address book, dialing phone numbers, launching program, and more.

Zabaware’s Ultra Hal software runs on most standard Windows computers. The artificial intelligence software is available for download at www.zabaware.com as a free 30-day trial.





I killed my laptop!

by

You know how I mentioned in my Thanks Giving post that I bought a new all in one printer on Saturday? Well, after I was done installing all the software for that on our desktop computer and my laptop I finally decided to install the software that came with my husbands HD video camera when we bought it three months ago.

I’d hesitated to install that software because it said it might cause problems with computers that had Roxio easy cd writer installed. I had a feeling that our laptop had that so I was really leary of adding the software. I hemmed and hawed about it for months as you can see …

Anyway, Saturday rolled around and I put the video camera software on the desktop and that seemed to go well so I went over to the lap top and I did a search on it for easy cd writer. I didn’t find any files that had that name or that phrase within them so I decided it must be safe to install the software. So I began installing it and went to do something on the desktop computer while it was installing.

When I came back to the laptop the software install was finished and there was a message to reboot the computer. So I did.

Bad Move!

The computer restarted and all I had when it was finished was a black screen with three of the scariest words that I’ve ever seen printed across the top left of the screen:

NO OPERATING SYSTEM

Ahhh! What? What did I do. What did I do? Why didn’t I listen to myself? I shouldn’t have installed that software! Ahhhh!

I rebooted the laptop a few times to be greeted by the same horrifying message.

I eventually shut down the computer in despair. I had the very tiniest hope that if the computer was off for a little while it’s memory might clear and if I was really lucky I might get a different message the next time I turned it on. Small hope I say …

In the meantime I remembered that I had tried to make restore disks when I first got the laptop last year. It took forever. I think I made 17 cds or something. I had the distinct feeling that the restore disks were not being created properly at the time, but I know I saved them. After all you can only access the system once to create restore disks so if they didn’t work I’d be up the creek without a paddle.

I went to look for the restore disks. I searched every room upstairs, the living room, dinning room and the basement. Chris was out at that Saga concert at the time so I was on my own in my search.

I never did find the restore disks. More than likely Chris moved them to some obscure place that I didn’t think to search, but I believe I searched through at least 70% of the house in all the obvious and not so obvious areas that one might hide 17 restore cds.

Eventually it was time to look at my dead laptop. I approached it slowly, sure that I’d see that terrible No Operating System message again when I turned it on. Much to my surprise and joy the computer actually booted into windows when I turned it on.

Of course it was full of error messages and my cd wouldn’t work right. I decided to go to the system tools folder and try system restore. My system wouldn’t restore itself back to the last restore point! I tried it a few different ways several times, picking different restore dates and it still wouldn’t work. I don’t believe I’ve ever had any errors on the laptop so I think this was the first time I’ve used system restore on it. I’ve used system restore on my desktop computer and it works fine. So I don’t know why it would on the laptop. I’ll have to try it sometime in the future.

I spent several hours using my “nurse” healing powers on my laptop. Manually uninstalling every program that the Video software program had installed. 20 programs installed – 20 programs removed. Finally … finally … the laptop worked with only one error for HP Photosmart Premiere (software installed for the new all in one printer).

That error seems to be sticking around, but I can live with one error message for a while until I figure out how to get rid of it.

The main thing is that the laptop is working again! It took hours and a mini heart attack to get it working again, but it’s running and I’m not going to try to install that video camera software again.

Automate your workplaces time and attendance calculations

by

If you own or manage a business you might be interested in taking a look at Kronos Automated Time and Attendance software.

The old saying “Time is Money” certainly applies when it comes to managing your employees attendance records and overtime hours.

Kronos’ Time and Attendance software will not only save you some money by eliminating the need for paper time sheets or other products that you must purchase regularly in order to keep track of your employees work hours, but it will also decrease the time spent calculating each employees hours and attendance. This would free up the business owners time or the employee hired to do this task and allow them to be more productive in other areas.

I know when I’ve worked for companies that manually calculated each employees hours and pay there were always errors. There were forgotten overtime or allowances for working a certain amount of hours, sometimes days that I had worked were skipped and went unpaid, and vacation pay was occasionally incorrect as well.

All of these payroll errors just make more work for the person manually calculating the timesheets and cause employee frustration.

Kronos has created four different Time and Attendance software programs.

One of the programs is named “Workforce TimeKeeper” and it’s a web-based application that will allow businesses to eliminate errors that are often associated with tracking a companies workforces time and attendance.

The second program is called Timekeeper Central and it’s a client-server solution that’s been designed to help small companies manage, collect and distribute time and attendance data automatically.

Then there is the Kronos iSeries Timekeeper which is a time and attendance application for the IBM iSeries platform.

The final time and attendance solution developed by Kronos is called webTA. This program supports the federal governments unique time and attendance requirements.

As you can see Kronos has created software that will suit any business or organization whether large or small. Each of these programs have been designed to give a business better control over labor costs. The automated system will also allow businesses to apply pay and work related policies consistently across the board.

These seem like great time and attendance keeping solutions to me and I’m sure it would alleviate the headache of manually calculating time sheets for a lot of companies if they were to look into the Kronos Automated Time and Attendance software.

DTIDATA Specializes in Hard Drive Recovery

by

I frequent quite a few forums and it’s not uncommon for me to read posts regularly about someones computer breaking down or how they got a virus and can’t boot their computer anymore or worst of all how they heard funny noises coming from their computer and then their hard drive suddenly failed.

Did you know that when you hear strange sounds or a clicking noise coming from your hard drive that it’s probably best to shut down your computer and not attempt any recovery attempts? You can end up causing more damage to your hard drive if you continue to run it when it’s in a degraded state. Doing this could make your data unrecoverable!

If you suspect that your hard drive isn’t working properly and could fail or know that it’s broken thats the time to get in touch with a hard drive repair specialist.

DTIDATA specializes in Hard Drive Recovery. Their staff of engineers keep themselves up to date on the latest technology related to hard drive data recovery. In fact, their R&D team is responsible for developing new recovery technology so you can rest assured that when you have your hard drive repaired by DTIDATA they are using the latest and likely best techniques available.

DTIDATA has a class 100 clean room that they use for all Hard Drive Recovery. This will help ensure that no dust or particles will get into your hard drive as they work on retrieving your data.

Once you send your hard drive to DTIDATA for Hard drive recovery and it’s received by the company they log it into their database and assign a case number. They then send you a message that includes your case number so that you can track your hard drives recovery.

One thing that I really like about this company is that they don’t charge any diagnostic fees. If they can’t recover data from your hard drive there’s no charge, in fact they don’t charge you at all unless they recover 100% of your data. That’s how confident they are in their service.

Hopefully your hard drive continues to work well for a long time to come, but if you ever do need to have your hard drive repaired or have the data recovered remember DTIDATA.

Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical cuts transcription costs for medical professionals

by

The next time I go to work I’m going to have to tell the doctors that I work with in the ER about Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking – Medical dictation software.

Many of the doctors that I work with in the ER, regular medical doctors and specialists, dictate their notes via a phone service after they’ve seen a patient. Now, if they installed Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical on their office computer they could simply dictate their patient notes at their own computer. This software could dramatically lower transcription costs for hospitals, doctors offices and medical centers.

This software is said to have 99% accuracy. Dragon naturally speaking can be used with any type of medical software application as well as the full Microsoft Office Suite. I’ve used Dragon Naturally Speaking in the past, but this special Medical version contains a complete library of 14 medical specialty vocabularies covering over 60 sub specialties. The software can of course be further customized for individual specialty practices.

If you are a medical professional think about how Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical might save time and money for your office or practice.

Meta

Search this site

Tags

blog blogs camera Canada Chris computer crohns dinner dog Family flower flowers Food friends funny garden Gardening Green Thumb Sunday Health and Fitness Health Fitness and Beauty holiday home Home and Lifestyle house husband IBD Inflammatory bowel disease Internet Music neighbors pain photo photos plants puppy Shopping sick sleep spring Toronto TV Video visit website Wordless Wednesday