Items tagged with voice recognition
Earlier this week we talked a bit about an issue with an Amazon Echo device that had recorded an audio clip of a woman's conversation and then set the clip to a random contact on her contacts list. The woman was rightfully fearful of the Alexa voice powered device after that incident, and had vowed to never use it again and wanted a refund. Amazon confirmed early on, according to reports, that it had gone through her logs and verified that the incident did, in fact, occur just as she claims. Amazon has now reached out to HotHardware and other tech publications with an update on the situation and a rather convoluted explanation for how the incident took place. Amazon said, "Echo woke up due...
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Microsoft's software is pervasive in meeting rooms across the globe, and the company is giving us a glimpse at how it plans to expand that domination with meeting rooms of the future. At the year's Build conference, Microsoft pulled the wraps off a hardware prototype that uses all of today's hottest tech buzzwords to make communicating with peers even more seamless. The device, which is shaped like a cone, is equipped with a 360-degree camera and a powerful microphone array. The camera uses facial recognition to scan the room and identify meeting participants. The microphones are used to pick up their voice and transcribe everyword spoken in a meeting in real-time using Microsoft's...
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We all know that asking an Amazon Echo speaker powered by Alexa to play a specific artist or song is possible (among other things). Amazon has been adding some new music controls to Alexa devices that make it easier to play songs when you don't know the artist or song title. These new playback commands are perfect for users who listen to a lot of music without knowing what they are really listening to. You now have the ability to ask for music to be played based on the last time you used Alexa for tunes. Amazon says that you can now ask Alexa to "play me a Hold Steady song I heard last month" or "Alexa, play music that I was listening to earlier today." Amazon is trying to make controlling music...
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Amazon has updated its voice assistant Alexa with a cool new feature that many people who have an Echo device with multiple users have been wanting. That new feature is the ability to identify voices and allow access to your own messages, playlists and other content without having to tell the Echo device specifically which content to access. The new feature started to roll out yesterday. Voice recognition works with the Echo smart speaker and any other devices with Alexa built-in. The feature comes after Google launched its Home speaker earlier this year with similar functionality. Setting the new feature up requires the user to register their voice, and once registered you can sync it with Amazon...
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Earlier this month Google rolled out some new products that took aim directly at Amazon and the Echo line of devices. Those new Google devices include the Google Home Mini and Google Home Max. The Home Mini is set to launch on October 19 and ahead of that official launch, as Google and other manufacturers normally do, the device was placed in the hands of reviewers around the globe. One of those reviewers is reporting that the Home Mini he was writing about was almost constantly recording sounds in his home. For some folks, this might not be a big deal, but all of the audio it records is sent out to Google servers. Google isn't sitting around listening in on all that audio; what the device hears...
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Your digital voice assistant app is incompetent. Yes, Siri can give you a list of Italian restaurants in the area, Cortana will happily look up the weather, and Google Now will send a text message, if you ask it to. But compared to Hound, the newest voice search app on the block, all three of the aforementioned assistants might as well be bumbling idiots trying to outwit a fast talking rocket scientist. At its core, Hound is the same type of app -- you bark commands or ask questions about any number of topics and it responds intelligently. And quickly. What's different about Hound compared to Siri, Cortana, and Google Now is that it's freakishly fast and understands complex queries that would...
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Google is all about teaming up with third-party partners to improve its core services. We saw it earlier this week when Google added over 70 new apps to Google Now, including Spotify and Feedly, and now Google's voice actions is learning to play with others as the first set of partners for custom commands arrive on Android. As explained the Android Developers' Google+ page, this new feature will allow users to say things like, "OK Google, listen to NPR" or "OK Google, show attractions near me on TripAdvisor." Rather than being directed to NPR's or TripAdvisor's respective websites, these commands now open the accompanying apps (assuming you have them installed) and perform the requested action....
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Samsung has confirmed that some of its slightly older Smart TV models are currently uploading recorded voice communication without any form of encryption to protect the user's privacy. This goes against what Samsung stated in a recent blog post clarifying the limited circumstances in which voice commands are recorded and transmitted to a server. Backtracking a moment, the web freaked out when it was discovered that Samsung's Smart TVs were seemingly eavesdropping on living room conversations. The truth wasn't quite as nefarious, though a supplement to Samsung's privacy policy did reveal that some voice commands could be transmitted to a third-party service to convert the speech to text, in part...
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Thanks in part to the popularity of services like Siri and Google Now, voice recognition technology is a hot commodity these days. It should come as little surprise, then, that Facebook has agreed to acquire Mobile Technologies, makers of Jibbigo, a speech-to-speech translation app for Android and Apple mobile devices. One unique feature of Jibbigo is that it's the world first speech translator on a phone that not only runs online, but offline as well. "Facebook, with its mission to make the world more open and connected, provides the perfect platform to apply our technology at a truly global scale. We look forward to continuing to develop our technology at Facebook and finding new and interesting...
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One of the worst kept secrets in Cupertino is that Apple's beloved Siri voice assistant contains DNA from Nuance Communications, the same company that birthed the Dragon line of speech recognition products. The fact is, Nuance has quite the collection of voice-related technologies and patents, and even though it was widely suspected to be powering Siri, there was never an official acknowledgement from Apple or Nuance. Until now. In an interview with AllThingsD, Nuance Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Paul Ricci answered a bevy of questions about speech technologies, and in doing so, he confirmed that Nuance is powering Siri, adding that its technology is both client-based (locally) and cloud-based,...
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Is Skynet nearly upon us?A Japanese program has been created that finishes people's sentences, according to a report in New Scientist.A team from the National Instititute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba developed it and they claim it's virgin territory. There have been plenty of speech recognition software programs in the past, and they've gotten a bad rep, though the technology has improved immensely in recent years.This however, takes a step past simple speech recognition and finishes your sentences for you.There are some actual practical applications, too, the report pointed out.Say, for example, you're driving to meet someone at a restaurant you've never been to before....
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It’s easy for us to distinguish a computerized voice from that of a real person. Even though we can generally figure out what the computer is trying to convey despite poor pronunciations and bad phrasing, understanding doesn’t eliminate the frustration many of us feel when trying to deal with an automated human substitute. Now, thanks to new technology developed by IBM scientists, we may not have to tolerate robotic sounding voices for much longer. Supposedly, the new computerized voice is nearly indistinguishable from a human’s voice. Part of what makes the new computer voice sound realistic is the inclusion of verbal tics such as “ums,” “ers,” and sighs. This new system is so sophisticated...
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