voice recognition

Siri was hailed as a innovation when it was unveiled with the iPhone 4S. But do iPhone owners still talk to her?

In a column for yesterday's New York Times, writer Nick Bilton said he believes the romance may have soured between Siri and her users.

Initially enthused about the new voice assistant, Bilton found that too many of his conversations ended up in a failure to communicate, with Siri either unavailable or unable to provide the right information. And he doesn't seem to be the only one having communication problems with Siri.

Bilton also noted that many … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--In-car voice recognition technology has come a long way, but there's much room for improvement. One problem voice-recognition technology faces is that is that there's only so much memory and processing power available in the dashboard at any given time, which has to be shared with navigation, media playback, traffic data, and other infotainment functions. Spansion, a company best known for providing flash memory products to OEMs, thinks it has the solution in its newly unveiled Spansion Acoustic Coprocessor, claimed to be the first of its kind.

The Spansion Acoustic Coprocessor is basically a system on a … Read more

Should you trust that official-sounding guy on the phone trying to talk you into transferring cash from your account to his? Well, we're going to go out on a limb here and say no, but in case that's not so obvious, new voice analysis technology out of Japan promises to help spot the scammers for you.

Nagoya University and Fujitsu have created software they say can automatically identify situations in which one party might "overtrust" the other. It does so by detecting changes in voice pitch and volume level that can occur under psychological duress.

By combining this technology with keywords such as "indebtedness" or "compensation" that are characteristic to a specific type of remittance-soliciting phone-phishing scam called furikomesagi, the researchers have developed a setup now being tested in collaboration with the National Police Agency of Japan and the Bank of Nagoya. … Read more

Speak now, or forever hold your chance to win this week's Crave giveaway. The prize: Nuance's Dragon Dictate 2.5 for Mac. The speech recognition software boasts some enhancements over earlier versions, including full support for Microsoft Word 2011 and new Facebook- and Twitter-sharing capabilities.

Dragon Dictate 2.5 also takes advantage of the recently introduced Dragon Remote Mic App, a free application that lets you use an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad as a wireless microphone for Dragon via Wi-Fi.

Normally, Dragon Dictate 2.5 would cost you $179.99, but you have the chance to get it for nada, nothing, zip, zilch. So how do you go about snagging this week's freebie? There are a few rules, so please take a moment to stop talking and read them carefully. … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Looks like Siri was just the beginning.

Okay, even Siri wasn't the beginning. The ability to do voice-command isn't particularly new, but the marquee feature for Apple's iPhone 4S has gotten the masses to recognize and appreciate its benefits. For the first time, voice-command was a feature people talked about and coveted.

At CES, there were better implementations and voice-commands popping up on different devices. Big-name companies got into the mix. Dieter Zetsche, head of Mercedes Benz, said voice would play a major role in its cars, calling them a driver's "digital companion." … Read more

Nuance Communications, the leading voice recognition software company, is jumping into the TV market.

The company said Monday--at the International Consumer Electronics Show--that it will launch Dragon TV, a voice and natural language platform for TVs, devices and set-top boxes. The idea is that Nuance’s software would be included in these devices. Nuance’s move is notable as chatter about Apple delivering a TV connected with its Siri software heats up. Nuance appears to be going for the broad-partnership-in-multiple-devices approach.

Dragon TV, the name of Nuance’s system, will be designed to allow voice to replace remotes and … Read more

In a series of patent applications, Apple has outlined how it plans to combat noisy environments by using voice recognition to activate and control noise-cancellation technologies.

By changing the noise-cancellation process to fit specific voices, Apple thinks it can better manage noise-ridden spaces, especially for mobile devices while making calls or recording voice memos.

Four patent applications relating to this technology were uncovered by AppleInsider at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office:

commentary What do Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Kinect have in common besides processing voice commands? Right from the get-go they were both a top target for tinkerers.

Look no further than this past weekend's very neat hack of Siri, which managed to get the voice software--which is perhaps best known for being the first major voice recognition system that has a personality--to control a home thermostat.

Not content with searching for weather reports and dictating voice notes, programmer Peter Lamonica put together a software workaround to funnel Siri's voice commands through a separate server, then used those commands to interface with the digital thermostat. The end result let Siri both check and change the temperature settings, using Apple's servers to do the heavy lifting when it came to transcribing. Keep in mind this is just a little more than a month out from the release of the iPhone 4S.

Is this a watershed moment for the kinds of things mobile phones can do? No, but it was a big one for Siri. Users took some of its basics, and rethought the kinds of things they could do with it.

Something very similar happened with the Kinect last year. Unlike Apple, which packaged Siri as an exclusive software feature within the iPhone 4S, Microsoft sold the Kinect as a $150 add-on for its Xbox 360 platform. The move gave owners of a five-year old piece of hardware new ways to control their system, and games with voice and motion controls.

Seeing a cool new gadget to hack, tinkerers--and not just Xbox owners--took to the platform immediately, wanting to have their way with the hardware, and use it in places Microsoft was not yet offering, like on desktop PCs. A week after the Kinect's release, that's just what happened. … Read more

Look out Siri, there's a new virtual assistant in town--and you definitely don't want to get on his bad side.

YouTube user programmer4fun has created his own virtual personal assistant using a 3D model of the Terminator T-800 cyborg and his Microsoft Kinect.

In his video description, programmer4fun explains that he used the Kinect SDK to make use of the head tracking and speech recognition software. The Kinect sits behind him, though he notes it can be anywhere, while a small LED projector beams the Terminator's head onto the wall. He's even built in code to support anaglyph 3D if you really want to get up close and personal with the Terminator. … Read more