YouTube Audio Transcription broken, hates Australians
Announced on the 5th of March, YouTube had added audio transcription to videos in an effort to increase accessibility. Just hover over the CC button in the player, then select the ‘Transcribe Audio’ option. Available in 50 different languages, it’s an ambitious venture from Google. One that could potentially open up videos to truly world-wide viewing.
The Transcribe audio feature is currently in beta and they’ve certainly got some work to do. I tested it on one of my videos (obviously have an Australian accent), it got this sentence completely wrong.
In the example below, I actually say the words:
“Hi this is Jason from Wodonga Australia and I think the story of the decade has..”
YouTube Translate interprets what I said as:
”but is this just in from would over a stray a and I think the story of the day Kennedy has”.
Clearly it’s not even close, naturally I wasn’t expecting 100% accuracy here, but this translation is so far off, it’s completely unusable. Have you experienced the same results ?
More @ YouTube and the YouTube Blog
Google Nexus One, shipping to Australia ? A: No.
Image credit: Engadget
The latest and greatest Smart Phone is about have its very own launch event in the US. If your really keen, you can tune into the Gizmodo Liveblog at 1PM US Eastern Time (Around 8am AEDST) tomorrow morning to get all the juicy details.
The Nexus One is particularly interesting as it’ll be the first phone to run Android OS 2.1. Pricing leaks indicate a US$530 unlocked. Don’t bother with a US-to-Aus converter, we’re all familiar with the Australian Electronics tax. My guess is you should expect around the A$700-A$800 range. I wouldn’t expect any Australian carrier support and subsidy tomorrow, although that may come in the future. Engadget got hands on with what they believe to be the production model and just posted a very timely review [Engadget].
What is interesting, is that the leaked Nexus One documentation, is this little gem – “There is language in the agreement of shipping outside the US”. Can we conclude from this that the Nexus One will be available via Google’s website with delivery options for Australia ? It’s hard to be sure at this point. Good news is we’ll know soon enough – tomorrow.
I love my iPhone, but I also really want there to be a viable alternative.
Update
Overnight the Google event happened and the official site is now live – http://google.com/phone – you’ll notice when visiting the site from an Australian IP, the right hand side of the page has this message – “Sorry, the Nexus One phone is not available in your country.”
As pointed out by GDGt’s coverage – “As of today Google is shipping to US, UK, Singapore, and Hong Kong.”
Google Chrome OS running !! [screen shots]
Thanks to the guys over at GDGT, I now have Google Chrome OS running in a VMware virtual machine. As you can see from the screens below, it’s really just Google Chrome with a couple of extra icons.
In the top right, there’s control for Power Management, Networking (wifi or wireless) and essentially Chrome options menu.
It did take some configuring to get networking happening, so the first attempt wasn’t exactly successful.
Google Chrome OS running on Windows 7 in a VMware virtual machine
The About Screen
Networking fixed 
Some work to do on getting techAU.tv to display correctly. Related to screen res, no way of changing.
If your thinking you want to check this out yourself.. you don’t. The experience even with a well resourced VM is not a nice one. For now just be content with the Google Chrome browser.
Australian streets getting viewed by Google again
Google maps and more specifically street view in Australia is about to get an upgrade. Next month the street view cars will be back on our streets in force, snapping updated photos of Australia.
When street view first launched one of my biggest questions was how Google would deal with the currency of images. With photographing each street being such a massive undertaking, they could be excused for leaving the current batch of images up for years.
After launching in August last year, Google are sending their fleet to “Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth and parts of Tasmania”.
The new Australian imagery will be available sometime within the next year..
More info @ Google Australia blog via news.com.au
The Complete Guide to Google Wave
If you got a Google Wave invite, logged in and checked it out, then were left scratching your head as to what the heck you would ever use Wave for, then check out http://completewaveguide.com/
It’s a free, online, constantly updating, comprehensive user manual by Gina Trapani with Adam Pash
Make your building 3D in Google Earth
Not satisfied with a top-down view of your business ? Then you should check out Google Building Maker. It makes it pretty easy to create a 3D representation of your building, simply drop a pin on top of your building, your then presented with 6 images which you position a rectangular box over each side. This maps out the dimensions of the building in 3D, what’s really efficient is google provides the materials for the different sides to your building.
There is a verification process so you don’t need to be concerned that someone else will turn your skyscraper into a matchbox.
http://www.google.com/buildingmaker
Google Chrome extensions are finally here !
If you like living on the cutting edge (like me), you’ll already be running the latest developer builds of Google Chrome. Something that’s been lacking in Chrome is the ability to extend the browser’s default functionality via extensions. Good news – Extensions are here!
Whilst the offerings right now available @ http://www.chromeextensions.org/ aren’t exactly earth shattering, this will only grow over time as more developers get on board.
The platform itself works quite well, with extensions installed seamlessly with no browser restarts required. The extensions interface allows easy control over your installed plugins – enable, disable and uninstall.
The good news is (so far) extensions don’t seem to have a negative effect on Chrome’s performance.
More @ Lifehacker