Speech Heads, I’m sure some of you out there are well familiar with today’s highlighted technology: The Talking Bottle Opener. Any one of you with a speechy sports fan in your life who loves knocking back a cold one while they watch the big game has doubtlessly seen one of these.
Personally, I can say that my father has a drawer full of these things in his kitchen. There’s the one that plays the University of Miami fight song; another that features Curly Howard (of Three Stooges fame) saying, How about a beer? Nyuk, nyuk, nyuck; one that has Homer Simpson saying, Ooo, beer!; and a number of other ones that I’ve more successfully suppressed from my memory.
My father, it should be noted, doesn’t even really drink. He’s one of these types that constantly tries to foist a bottle on his visitors without ever actually imbibing himself. Often times, I suspect he’s just trying to create opportunities to use his varied speech-enabled openers and only stocks his refrigerator with boxes of Costco-bought “Beers of the World” to use them.
My dad is pretty much just a big speech head with a real flair for novelty. In fact, he is probably where I inherited my own insatiable love of speech tech from.
Back to today’s tech, though. The talking bottle opener is a pretty straightforward device. It takes advantage of the natural conductive properties of most bottle caps. The opener’s metal teeth are essentially a broken electrical circuit. When you press the opener to the cap, the circuit between the teeth is completed by the metal cap, thus activating the speech and making the handheld device issue forth its pre-programmed utterance.
This site has a ton of them. It even has a talking Simpson’s pizza cutter…
To the best of our knowledge at STB, none of the bottle openers have an onboard dynamic speech interface, though. Now, this may just be my pint of view, but it sure seems like some enterprising Speech Head could rig a beer opener with a TTS engine to make one, if she were so inclined.
Confession time, Speech Heads!
The reason I’m really writing this post is that I would like to solicit the speechmunity to produce a Speech Technology Blog talking bottle opener; one that uses my brother Adam B.’s own voice to utter some of his favorite catch phrases like Get speechy with it! or That’s speechlarious! or This IVR is bustin’ my brains!
Please, please, oh please. My birthday is in just a couple of weeks. Make my birthday wish come true, speech heads.
Never mind.