Free Republic

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has delivered a knockout punch to Google, securing a record-shattering $1.375 billion settlement for the Big Tech’s covert surveillance of everyday Americans. This staggering sum is nearly a billion dollars more than what 40 states combined were able to wring from Google for similar offenses — a testament to Paxton’s unrelenting crusade against Big Tech tyranny.

In a previous video I introduced the oldest voices that can still be heard through recordings made on Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph and Thomas Edison’s early tinfoil phonograph. This time, we look at how efforts to promote Edison’s new “perfected” phonograph in Britain led to the preservation of the voices of many famous Victorians - from poets and composers like Robert Browning and Arthur Sullivan, to major political figures like William Gladstone. We will also see how his rivals finally succeeded in recording the voice of Queen Victoria.

I'm looking for a good app that turns text to voice. I'm wanting to use it on sci fi and horror books that are available in text but not audio yet. So I'd like decent quality, but able to covert large books. Some books like Stephen King ones are enormousness so it would need to have a good capacity.

High pitched, extended vowels and incredibly articulated: so-called 'gay voice' is a real phenomenon, researchers say. Two science YouTubers have scoured studies behind the theory that homosexual men have a unique twang that transcends aspects like culture and upbringing. Mitch Moffit, a biologist, and Greg Brown, a science teacher — who are both gay — explored what exactly constitutes a 'gay voice' and what might cause it... They found that analysis comparing the pitch of straight and homosexual men's voices found key differences in how they speak. Mr Moffit explained: 'Results find that gay men speak with higher pitch variation...

So much for Aerosmith’s farewell tour. The band announced they are retiring from touring after five decades together, revealing their legendary lead singer Steven Tyler’s voice can’t recover from his injury. “It was 1970 when a spark of inspiration became Aerosmith. Thanks to you, our Blue Army, that spark caught flame and has been burning for over five decades. Some of you have been with us since the beginning and all of you are the reason we made rock ‘n’ roll history,” their Instagram post read on Friday. “It has been the honor of our lives to have our music...

The Department of Justice pushed back on the releasing of the audio tapes of special counsel Robert Hur's interview with President Joe Biden, citing "deep fake" concerns. The DOJ stated that if the audio tapes were released, they could potentially be altered by artificial intelligence and passed off as authentic. “The passage of time and advancements in audio, artificial intelligence, and ‘deep fake’ technologies only amplify concerns about malicious manipulation of audio files,” a Friday filing obtained by Politico states. “To be sure, other raw material to create a deepfake of President Biden’s voice is already available, but release of...

The cockpit voice recorder data on the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 jet which lost a panel mid-flight on Friday was overwritten, U.S. authorities said, renewing attention on long-standing safety calls for longer in-flight recordings. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) chair Jennifer Homendy said on Sunday no data was available on the cockpit voice recorder because it was not retrieved within two hours - when recording restarts, erasing previous data. The U.S. requires cockpit voice recorders to log two hours of data versus 25 hours in Europe for planes made after 2021. The industry has been wrestling with the...

Former Secretary of State and New York Sen. Hillary Clinton (D) on Monday penned a tribute to her late colleague, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), describing her as a champion of democracy who was “brave, honorable, honest and unafraid to do what was right for her constituents and her country.” In an opinion piece in The Washington Post, Clinton recalled arriving in Washington as first lady in 1993, when Feinstein first arrived to the Senate. Clinton said when she heard Feinstein use her first floor speech to advocate for the Family and Medical Leave Act, “I knew I had found a...

Reloaded for my new subscribers, my non-political, historical examination of Hitler's normal speaking voice, a subject unfamiliar to many historians and students of WWII.

It was a dead “ringer” for her daughter. Artificial intelligence has taken phone scams to a frightening new level. An Arizona mom claims that scammers used AI to clone her daughter’s voice so they could demand a $1 million ransom from her as part of a terrifying new voice scheme.

VIDEOThe voice of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. changed drastically over the years. In fact, many of you will be very surprised if this is the first time you heard his voice prior to the year 2000. He was diagnosed to have a condition known as spasmodic dysphonia which began in 2001 and you can definitely hear the change in his voice after that.

An East Palestine, Ohio, man’s voice apparently became high-pitched since the train derailment and toxic explosion on February 3. His doctors told him he has chemicals in his body; however, no one in the area can perform the toxicological tests to determine what those chemicals are, 40-year-old Wade Lovett, an auto detailer, told the New York Post this week. “My voice sounds like Mickey Mouse. My normal voice is low. It’s hard to breathe, especially at night. My chest hurts so much at night I feel like I’m drowning. I cough up phlegm a lot. I lost my job because...

A singer's primary genre can impact the likelihood of developing vocal fold injury and may even influence the specific type of injury that occurs, a recent study suggests. The two-part study, led by Lesley Childs, M.D., involved the detailed review of more than 1,000 patient records. Phonotraumatic lesions that develop on the vocal folds include benign nodules, pseudocysts, and hemorrhagic polyps, all of which can lead to hoarseness. These injuries are typically caused by overuse or straining of the voice. The study found that while nodules were nearly equally distributed across all singing genres, opera singers presented with a significantly...

VIDEOThe resemblance between the two voices is uncanny. Both in voice quality and speaking patterns of Arizona gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs and Brett Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford. Since it seems like Blasey Ford was coached to sound like a helpless child, many in the public did not buy into that phony way of speaking. Listen to them both speaking back to back and judge for yourselves whether Katie Hobbs consciously decided to borrow Blasey Ford's helpless child voice while making her pitiful apology.

Vin Scully, the Hall of Fame voice of the Dodgers for 67 years, died, the club announced. He was 94. “We have lost an icon,” said Dodgers president and CEO Stan Kasten. “The Dodgers Vin Scully was one of the greatest voices in all of sports. He was a giant of a man, not only as a broadcaster, but as a humanitarian. He loved people. He loved life. He loved baseball and the Dodgers. And he loved his family. His voice will always be heard and etched in all of our minds forever. I know he was looking forward to...

I have some WAV files I'd like to convert to text. Can Dragon Naturally Speaking convert sound files (WAV or MP3) to text? Or must I dictate live for Dragon to create a text file?I found many website that allow me to upload MP3 files and convert them to text in the cloud. But I prefer to have a program on my computer.If Dragon doesn't do this, is there some software that can do it? Something not cloud-based.

Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) on Monday railed against Vice President Kamala Harris as the “voice” of the United States on the world stage. Gabbard, reacting to Harris’ confusing remarks at a Munich press conference about the ongoing tension between Russia and Ukraine, pointed out that Harris has “no foreign policy understanding” nor “concept of the cost of war.”

On Friday, as Joe Biden bumbled his way around the G7 Summit, his administration was hard at work dissembling more Trump-era immigration policies.During his first week in office, President Trump created the Victims of Immigration Crime and Engagement Office (VOICE) within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). For the first time, victims of crimes committed by illegal aliens were given the acknowledgment and support they deserved.That support has now come to a screeching halt with the closing of VOICE.According to the AP, VOICE is to be replaced by the newly-created Victims Engagement and Services Line (VESL). VESL’s focus is to...

The Biden administration has dismantled and replaced a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office created during the Trump presidency to help victims of crimes committed by immigrants in a further break with his predecessor’s border policies. Trump launched VOICE (Victim Of Immigration Crime Engagement Office) in an executive order during his first week in office in 2017. VOICE "was created to acknowledge and serve the needs of crime victims and their families who have been affected by crimes committed by individuals under the investigative jurisdiction of ICE," the Department of Homeland Security says on its website. "I’ve had to hold...