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"The permanent government now is the anchorpeople. They don't get elected, and year after year they're responding emotionally to this or that."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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| Lecton | ||
| A device that would read aloud an electronic text book. |
Waking up in the future is never easy - after a few centuries, technology advances.
| The bookstore resembled, instead, an electronic laboratory. The books were crystals with recorded contents. They can be read the aid of an opton, which was similar to a book but had only one page between the covers. At a touch, successive pages of the text appeared on it. But optons were little used, the sales-robot told me. The public preferred lectons - like lectons read out loud, they could be set to any voice, tempo, and modulation. Only scientific publications having a very limited distribution were still printed, on a plastic imitation paper. |
| From Return from the Stars,
by Stanislaw Lem. Published by Not known in 1961 Additional resources -
|
Compare this item to the reading machine from Robert Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land.
Notice also that this is not simply a "book on tape." This is a performance that the user can alter - setting voice, tempo and modulation. See this article on Vocaloid Voice - Soul Singing Synthesis for a modern example of this technology.
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| FlexPai Foldable Phone By Royole |
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'... the young men in the streets who applied polyimde OLED body film to their bared shoulders.'
'Bioengeering had put out a spec report on the long crawly things five months back.'
'The air-taxi found its way past and around other ground-cars...'
'They tried to use it today and it wouldn't work. No colors and no ceph patterns, neither one...'
'Cerebral Electromagnetic Emmission Amplification and Relay System — call it artificial telepathy, if you like.'
'[It] caused his televised image... to mouth the vowels and consonants beautifully.'
'There was almost no sound, just a steady velvety whirr as the taxi sped along.'
Life imitates anime art.
