Your Smartphone Is Listening To You Sleep: The Next Terrifying, Awesome Frontier In Voice Tech

Your Smartphone Is Listening To You Sleep: The Next Terrifying, Awesome Frontier In Voice Tech:
Last week Siri, Apple's voice-commanded digital assistant, got an upgrade that gave her many new powers. But developments in voice recognition tech across all kinds of devices mean that your next-next-gen smartphone will easily surpass Siri's passive listening skills and turn it, and systems like it, into chat-happy, always-on life mates.

Nuance is the company behind many of the innovations in voice recognition, and may or may not have played a part in the latest iteration of Siri, which grew out of SRI International. The recent advances in voice tech are partly due to developments in the core technology of voice recognition and partly due to Nuance's clever choice to make a database of millions of bits of real speech from its users, which it can use to train and optimize its algorithms--even to the point of better understanding different dialects. This week the company's chief technology officer Vlad Sejnoha revealed that Nuance has been working with chip manufacturers to give smartphones an amazing new voice-command power. Nuance wants to give phones the power to listen to you when they're otherwise "asleep."





Think about how often your phone is just lying there, mute and dark-screened on your desk or bedside cabinet. All that billion-dollar tech (at least in terms of R&D) is sitting there idle, passive ... wasted. It'll wake up, sure, when you get an email or someone rings it, but to interact with it yourself you have to wake it up and then tap at its screen or engage with its voice command system--this may or may not be Siri, or Samsung's S-Voice or Google's own rumored Majel project.

The different scenario Nuance's CTO imagines is that in the future your phone will always be listening. Isn't that a bit stalker-y?

So your phone is quietly sitting there, sipping at battery power so it doesn't consume that precious resource, until you ask it when your next meeting is, or if it can text your partner or if it's going to rain later. The benefits are obvious, says Sejnoha--there's less of a barrier to using it because you don't have to turn on the device, and indeed if a strong mic is involved, you won't even have to be near it. Nuance is even working on making its system better at isolating a user's voice from background chatter so you could even drop it into conversations with your friends, throwing a question at your smartphone even while talking to other people in a noisy environment.

This isn't far off, Sejnoha explained to Fast Company in an email: "It's hard to predict exactly, but probably somewhere on the order of one to two years." While some current speech systems do allow devices to passively listen for commands, "Future implementations will allow the user to speak a single utterance that will both wake the device up and convey the desired intent, and do so in a manner that conserves power." Quite apart from super-charging the already sizable emotional attachment we have with our smartphones, this is going to have an enormous impact on daily life.





Siri 3.0 and her kin will likely be listening all the time, which means you'll use them more, and it will probably choose to volunteer information a bit more. Nuance's CTO, sensitive to this, added a rider to his discussion about the amazing potential of this tech--it shouldn't be used to make "creepy" apps. What this means is yet to be determined, but the fact he mentioned Microsoft's hated Clippy system is telling.

Google's Work Toward Standalone iOS Maps App Complicated by Integration with Google Earth

Google's Work Toward Standalone iOS Maps App Complicated by Integration with Google Earth: Amid varied reports claiming that Google has been working on a replacement standalone Maps app for iOS to replace the bundled app included with every version of iOS until last week's release of iOS 6, The New York Times weighs in with its own sources claiming that Google is indeed working on a standalone app for iPhone and iPad and is hoping to have it available in "another couple months or so".

As was noted yesterday by The Verge, Apple and Google still have over a year left on their contract for Google to provide Maps for iOS, and thus Google was caught off guard when Apple announced in June that it would be replacing Google's solution with its own Maps app for iOS 6. As a result, Google still needs several more months to complete work on a standalone offering to be submitted to Apple for inclusion in the App Store.




The New York Times notes that another challenge faced by Google stems from its desire to build 3D imagery into its upcoming Maps app for iOS 6. The functionality was added to the Google Earth app several months ago, but moving it to the more traditional mapping app will require additional work.

Twelve South HiRise takes iMacs and Apple displays to new heights, tidies up in the process

Twelve South HiRise takes iMacs and Apple displays to new heights, tidies up in the process:

Many of those who buy iMacs and Apple-designed displays are eager to avoid clutter in the first place, which makes an organizer all the more logical for those who'd like Desk Zero almost as much as Inbox Zero. Accessory maker Twelve South's newly available HiRise aims to clean it all up -- and lift it up. The aluminum-and-steel frame elevates Apple's modern all-in-ones and screens to any one of six points while conveniently leaving storage space that goes with the local computing decor, whether it's to hold external hard drives or car keys. Although the HiRise is no trivial expense at $80, it's better for propping up an iMac than an old college textbook, and arguably more useful as a whole.
Filed under: Desktops, Displays, Peripherals

Twelve South HiRise takes iMacs and Apple displays to new heights, tidies up in the process originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Sep 2012 17:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.