Skill Zone News issue 105

On the 8th September, Star Trek reached the grand old age of 50, and trekkies around the world rolled out claims that Star Trek had predicted the mobile phone, the iPad, bluetooth headsets, solid state disk drives, the universal translator, and speaking computers. But it was in 1961, a full five years before Star Trek's pilot episode, that an IBM 9704 broke new ground in voice synthesis technology when it sang the song Daisy in its electronic voice.

28th September 2016

A rose by any other name
It may be fifty years since Star Trek "invented" the universal translator but we are still some way from that reality. One of the big advances in natural-language translation has been to use "crowd sourcing", employing millions of voices from the internet, but it does have its pitfalls.

Roaming was not built in a day
A common claim by Trekkies is that Gene Roddenberry invented the mobile phone, but Kirk just had a pocket-sized two-way radio that let him talk to the ship. If it was a phone, they would have had text messaging, and cameras, and Mr Spock would have been taking selfies on every planet. And can you imagine the roaming charges?

Hanging up on the phone spammers
Have you ever met anyone who enjoys receiving spam phone calls? Telecoms operators are starting to make life more difficult for the phone spammers.

An eye to photography
The visionary Star Trek seemed to completely overlook the power of photography and the way it has been embraced by the world. In all of their expeditions to other planets, even in the most recent series, the crew never seemed to take a simple webcam with them and instead relied entirely on the spoken word over a two-way radio.

Aye-aye, robot
Like all sci-fi series, Star Trek had its fair share of robots, and like all sci-fi series, the robots were almost invariably humanoid, and often with ulterior motives. In the 21st century, we are gradually moving away from the idea of a robot as a frankensteinian monster.