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Business
Telephone-enabled Net Services
NORMALLY WE browse the web or collect e-mails using the browser or e-mail client installed in our computer. This week we will examine a product that helps us browse the web and pick up e-mails through simple voice commands transmitted through the telephone.
InternetSpeech
A well-designed web site is essential for any organisation. Apart from floating a web site with all the common features a web site designer should make sure that the site is accessible by maximum number of persons from anywhere at anytime. There are situations in life that prevent persons from accessing the various Net services whenever they need it. Here are some examples:
If you are on the move and want to access a site during a journey, it will be a difficult task, especially if you are in a remote place.
If you are a visually impaired person, it will well-nigh be impossible to browse the web with the present commonly available interface.
One of the major concerns of development activists and researchers is the ever-widening digital divide due to lack of availability of necessary tools such as PCs to majority of persons. And as PC is an essential component to access the Net, most persons are kept out of the ongoing IT revolution.
In this context, `etECHO', a product being featured by the company — InternetSpeech — assumes significance. The company that specialises in voice Internet helps the web developers/owners telephone-enable their web site. This means that the site can be accessed by anybody at anytime over the normal telephone — you do not need a PC to link to the site and access its contents. InternetSpeech's technology, once deployed, automatically translates the web site contents into text and reads out the text to the caller.
According to the information available at the company's web site, the service automatically converts the web pages into audio format — this means that you do not need to re-write the web content to make it speech-enabled. Apart from accessing web sites through telephone, one can listen to personal e-mails — send reply to mails through the telephone. This technology most probably would be quite useful for countries like India, which have got a reasonably good telephone penetration. More details on the product with a few interesting demos are available at the site: internetspeech.com
SurfSaver
Most of you regularly visit many sites and if you come across a link that contains information relevant to your needs you generally save it into your hard disk so that it can be viewed off-line at a later date. But when you save a web page this way usually you do not save it in an organised way and over time the number of saved web pages will definitely become rather large and unwieldy. This lack of proper organisation of the stored web pages will turn out to be a major bottleneck in accessing the relevant pages from the archive efficiently — to access a page perhaps you may need to examine all the pages stored in the machine! If you face a problem of this kind, you may seek the service of the free utility SurfSaver that lets you store web pages directly from your browser and organise it into various folders. Apart from helping you save a web page completely into a specified folder, the software provides powerful search feature that lets you spot the relevant pages from the web page database stored in your PC.
Download and install the program available at the link: www.surfsaver.com. Start the browser after the installation, and continue your web journey. Whenever you get into a site that suits your requirements and want to capture the page into your storage medium, right-click at the mouse and access the `SurfSaver' option from the menu that pops up. The utility allows you to save it in any folder of your liking. If you want to access the pages stored in various folders, invoke the `SurfSaver search' option. The search facility of this browser-add on provides many features that let you unearth the right pages without any effort. For example, if you want to retrieve all the pages collected from a particular web site, you can use the `URL' option and type in the address of the site concerned.
Virtual Network Computing
Virtual Network Computing is nothing but remote access computing. Suppose you have a PC at home and at work and you want to monitor your home desktop activity or run a program stored in the home PC sitting in your office. As already mentioned in this column a few weeks ago, remote access programs help you do this. Here is another useful but simple remote access program (brought to the author's notice by a NetSpeak reader) developed by AT&T Laboratories. The program (available at uk.research.att.com/vnc/index.html), that is being distributed under the GNU Public License consists of two parts: a server and a viewer. So, if you want to view your home PC from office PC, you need to install the server in the home PC and the viewer in the office machine.
If you are a network administrator, most probably you will like this software. You can install the server component in your personal machine and if somebody calls you for a help that needs your physical presence, go to the user's place, provide him/her the necessary service and while serving the user this way, you can also have an occasional glimpse at your desktop sitting in another remote corner of the campus through the PC on which you are currently working. Apart from letting you view your remote desktop, the VNC system allows you fire programs stored in your machine and edit files.
J. Murali
(The author can be contacted at: murali27@satyam.net.in)
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