Filip Jurčíček

Another one from the archive. Free Internet TV is a directory of live TV channels streaming for free on the web, sorted by language and region — Arabic, Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak. It was built when watching television in a browser still meant installing RealPlayer and hoping your ADSL line held up. Plenty of the links have rotted since, but the surprise is how many still resolve, and how useful the list remains if you want news in a language you are learning rather than the algorithm's idea of what you should watch. Like the Gmail Backup site, it now runs as a static mirror on S3 behind HTTPS. Old sites do not have to die; they just have to stop needing a database.

Jan Švec and I wrote Gmail Backup back in 2008 — a one-click tool that pulled your Gmail down over IMAP into a local folder, with incremental backups so you only fetched what was new. It ran on Windows and Linux, the code went out under GPL v3, and for a few years it was the answer people gave when someone asked how to get their mail off Google's servers. It is old software and the world has moved on, but the site is still up: www.gmail-backup.com , with the downloads, the documentation, the FAQ and the forum threads intact. I recently moved the whole thing to static hosting and put it back on HTTPS, which is the only reason it still loads at all. Worth remembering the premise, which has not aged: your mail is only yours if you have a copy of it.

A note on what I do when I am not writing about KALDI graphs: I take on voice AI work through Voicebre Systems , a small consultancy based in Prague. Three things, mostly: custom speech recognition — including voice commands and languages that the off-the-shelf stacks handle badly; natural language understanding for conversational systems; and end-to-end voice agents, from VUI design through to integration with whatever is already running in the business. The interesting problems are usually not the model. They are the data you are allowed to use, the latency budget, and what happens on the turn where the user says something nobody anticipated. If that is the shape of your problem, get in touch .

Most dictation today is a round trip to someone else's GPU. That is fine until your voice is the part the model was never trained on — an accent, a speech difference, a bad microphone in a noisy room — and you have no way to make it adapt. That is the problem Vokarys goes after. It is a desktop app that turns speech into text with recognition running locally on your computer, with punctuation and capitalisation added as you talk. It learns from your own voice over time, and recordings stay on the machine unless you explicitly choose to contribute them. There is a voice chat mode wired to Gemini as well, and a browser version if you would rather not install anything. If you have given up on dictation because the generic model never quite got you, it is worth a look.