Robotize voice7/19/2023 With a call, “you can’t resend the packets because there are just milliseconds of delay,” and there’s no backup copy of your voice. Your cell phone and other telecommunication systems also use error detection, “but with voice calls you don’t have the luxury of retransmission,” says Sanjay Udani, a technologist at Verizon who was one of the lead architects of the company’s FIOS network. But the fix is a lot more complicated with real-time, continuous streams of information like phone calls. The system just asks the sender to transmit another copy of the data. ![]() The errors can be relatively simple to deal with when the information is something like a text, an email, or the words and photos on a webpage. He described the effort in a book called “WiFi and the Bad Boys of Radio.” “We used a lot of that technology,” Hills says. WiFi also transmits data using radio frequencies. It’s a scenario he knows well from the time he spent in the early 1990s building the world’s first big WiFi network. “The receiver knows it has this stream of bits, and it has an error detection system that can tell there are little bursts of bits coming through that aren’t right,” Hills says. The solution starts with what’s called error detection. It’s the digital equivalent of the snow or noise you’d hear on an old AM radio. Other times the signal is strong enough to maintain a connection, but part of the information the radio waves are transmitting gets corrupted-ones get flipped to zeros, or strings of bits are lost altogether. Problems can crop up when the voice data is being converted from one format to another, but often it’s just interference during wireless transmission, like competing radio traffic or physical objects standing in the way. ![]() “That’s how digital works.”īut things can go wrong. Your phone transmits those bits through the air as radio waves. “At the other end, the receiver converts the ones and zeros back to the original information,” Hills says. That’s true no matter the content: texts, emails, your voice on a phone call, you name it. In other words, data is translated into ones and zeros that can be understood by a computer. ![]() “When information is going over a digital network, it has to be converted to bits,” says Alex Hills, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University. Instead, I learned that the robot-voice phenomenon is the result of benevolent technologies trying to prevent interrupted phone calls. When I set out to investigate, I didn’t turn up evidence of an encroaching cyborg army.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |