The Fox Report
Barry Fox’s technology column
One game-changer – one probably not
A
re you a phone-does-it-all
word with the cursor jumped playback
to around the same place in the audio.
The only let-down was the difficulty
of converting the captured writing
image into editable text. Before this
problem was solved, the Livescribe
company went off at tangents (including
marketing a pen called, ‘Sky’ which the
satellite broadcaster’s lawyers inevitably saw off) and then faded from view.
person? Or (like me) a horsesfor-courses computer, digital
SLR and phone person?
Yes, the processing power of smart
phones is phenomenal and the camera
optics of espionage quality. But some
of us still feel more comfortable with
a large screen and chunky keyboard. A
DSLR with see-through viewfinder is
much easier to hold steady and phone
screen finders are ‘washed out’ by sunlight. Inadvertently touching the wrong
part of the phone screen all too easily
changes the camera settings. Phone
zoom lens have limited range and the
tiny sensors struggle with low light.
Two recently launched phone ranges
looked like possible game changers.
One definitely is, the other… is still
to be determined.
Voice to text
It was a journalist colleague who,
like me, had for years been using a
Livescribe pen to record interviews,
who discovered a seriously clever feature called Recorder in Google’s new
Pixel range of phones. Pixel Recorder
gives near-instant transcription of a
speech recording into editable text.
As a reminder (if you ever knew),
Livescribe was a very smart pen with
built-in microphone and speaker, which
wrote on special paper over-printed
Pixel Recorder
The Pixel – a transcribing game-changer?
with a near invisible location map.
Infrared optics and memory in the pen
captured an image of the words written,
along with the matching audio. So the
pen stored the sound of an interview
and a mapped image of notes written.
Tapping the pen on the paper notebook, replayed the matching audio.
After copying to a computer, the text
displayed on screen and the recording
played through speakers. Touching a
Although it is not promoted as such,
Pixel Recorder realises the Livescribe
dream, and takes it to another level,
by recording audio and in real time
accurately converting it into editable
text, with astonishing accuracy.
I borrowed a Pixel 4 phone and
ran a very simple test. I sat the Pixel
alongside a PC, went into YouTube,
found a TV interview (Irish-dialect
Peter O’Toole telling showbiz stories to
American-dialect David Letterman) and
let Recorder record it. Almost immediately a transcript of the conversation
scrolled up on the phone screen, with
only a very few very minor mistakes.
Normally, the kind of processing
needed for this trick will rely on remote computer power and intelligence
‘in the cloud’ and thus depends on a
broadband connection. But not in this
case; all the work is being done inside
the phone. I checked this by putting the
Die-cast enclosures:
standard and painted
Learn more: hammfg.com/small-case
More than 5000 standard stocked enclosure designs
uksales<at>hammfg.com • 01256 812812
8
Practical Electronics | July | 2021
Pixel phone in Flight Mode. Real-time
transcription did not stop. So, Google’s
Pixel Recorder really is a game-changer.
My only regret is that there were no
Pixel phones with Recorder processing
available 10, 20, 30 years ago when I
was travelling round the world, taping
interviews and recording press conferences, followed by dreary hours in a
hotel room trying to accurately type up
what I could discern from the tapes.
I checked with Google and can confirm that the Recorder function comes
‘out of the box’ on Pixel 2 and later
Pixel phones, and is standard on the
current Android builds available on
Pixel. Can we expect to see Recorder
ported to PCs? ‘I don’t have any details
for it being available outside of Pixel
at present’, said a Google spokesman.
Do I still need a DSLR?
Meanwhile, promotional material for
the large-screen Redmi Note 10 Pro
phone from Chinese company Xiaomi
raised hopes that it might perhaps be a
comparable game-changer replacement
for DSLR cameras. I quote:
‘Redmi Note 10 Pro ups the ante as
one of the highest-resolution cameras
for smartphones, making it the midrange king in mobile photography. The
phone’s 108MP sensor with 9-in-1 binning technology and Dual native ISO
combine to capture the finest details,
provide a higher dynamic range and
offer an array of photo editing possibilities. Thanks to the Night mode
2.0, powered by a RAW multi-frame
algorithm, users can capture stunning
visuals even in low-light settings.’
Seeking more – and more coherent
– information, I contacted Xiaomi’s
appointed publicity people, Hill and
Knowlton Strategies, writing: The Note
10 is promoted as having a 108MP
camera sensor, but how crisp enlarged/
telephoto shots look, in bright or dim
tekkiepix pic of the month – 3D TV
Michael Rodd hosting ITV contractor
Television South’s 1982 3D-TV experiment.
3
D is one of those inventions
that keep on coming back. In
1982, TVS, the ITV station then
serving Southern England, promised
full-colour TV in 3D from a secret new
process. TV Times magazine distributed 8 million pairs of 3D glasses, while
high street retailers offered another 5
million pairs for sale.
The secret system was based on the
age-old anaglyph idea, with coloured
fringes added to overlapping left and
right eye images. Viewers with the special spectacles, which put a red filter
over one eye and blue over the other,
got an illusion of depth and a degree of
colour. But the millions of other viewers
who watched the cowboy feature film
Practical Electronics | July | 2021
Fort Ti, which TVS broadcast at peak
hours, saw drunken double images.
They jammed the switchboards of both
TVS and the Independent Broadcasting
Authority (then responsible for commercial broadcasting) with complaints.
Since the Fort Ti debacle, the broadcast
authorities in the UK have allowed only
very short 3D test transmissions.
In 1988 Aspex claimed to offer the
best of all worlds, 3D for people who
wear spectacles, and perfectly good,
even improved, pictures for those who
do not. The Aspex camera put a colour
fringe around any object on screen that
was moving. When a viewer wore a red
filter over one eye and cyan over the
other, there was an illusion of depth
when the image on screen was mobile.
With stationary objects, the 3D effect
disappeared. Viewers without spectacles
saw a normal picture when objects on
screen were stationary but colour fringing where there was movement.
In mid-1990, the Delta Group in London promised a new approach. Delta said
its Deep Vision system was, ‘a digital
process which especially encodes the image – when the image is viewed through a
television, or in a cinema, equipped with
a digital decoder, the viewer experiences
3D…Deep Vision activates the brain’s
powers of depth perception’.
They offered a demo in a darkened
room where a domestic TV set, roped off
some 25 feet away, screened clips from
Ben Hur and Casablanca.
light, will depend on how the 108MPixels are grouped/binned. Also, this will
affect the file size and thus how many
pictures the user can take before the
internal storage is full. So can Xiaomi
please clarify how the pixels are binned
– in groups of how many – to get a good
compromise between telephoto resolution, low-light sensitivity and file size?
Does the user have any control over
binning in any Settings menu?’
After a month and many reminders,
mostly simply ignored by HKS, I had
still received no meaningful answer.
For the sake of completeness, I copied
the unanswered question to HKS CEO
Simon Whitehead with a note suggesting ‘it might be worth the price of
a stamp to wonder if this (failure to
respond) interests you’.
So far there’s been no response. If
I ever get any useful answers, then I
will pass them on, but I am not holding my breath.
Those who dared to step over the
rope saw a flat plate, with vertical prism
stripes, hung over the screen. So each eye
saw mainly one of two laterally shifted
images. But even on the distant screen,
the pictures looked blurred and of poor
definition. There was a slight sensation
of depth, mainly on moving objects, psychologically enhanced by the inventor’s
enthusiastic commentary.
‘Look how good it is. You can really
feel it’s coming towards you’, the demonstrator encouraged, explaining that the
screen grid would be soon improved and
its effect assisted by electronics.
A couple of months later, Delta gave a
similar demonstration at Selfridges store
in London. ‘Don’t look at the quality of
the picture, just look at the depth’, shoppers were advised as they watched a
domestic TV set from the same decidedly
non-domestic viewing distance. Decoders would be on sale by Christmas, Delta
promised. But Christmas came and went
with no sign of Deep Vision.
Over the years, several companies
have shown TV sets that claim to give
3D without the need to wear glasses. But
they are not there yet.
More technology stories and images at:
https://tekkiepix.com/stories
Practical Electronics is delighted to be
able to help promote Barry Fox’s project
to preserve the visual history of preInternet electronics.
Visit www.tekkiepix.com for fascinating
stories and a chance to support this
unique online collection.
9
