VoiceIdentification
Latest
Amazon is teaching Alexa to distinguish different voices
For all of Alexa's many skills, one major thing Amazon's voice assistant is currently missing is the ability to distinguish who is actually speaking to it. According to a new report from Time magazine, however, the online retail giant is currently working to make that a reality.
FBI to roll out $1 billion public facial recognition system in 2014, will be on to your evildoing everywhere
They're watching you -- or at least will be in a couple of years. That's when the FBI is gearing up for a nationwide launch of a $1 billion project designed to identify people of interest, according to the New Scientist. Dubbed the Next Generation Identification (NGI) program, the high-tech endeavor uses biometric data such as DNA analysis, iris scans and voice identification to track down folks with a criminal history. The FBI also plans to take NGI on the road literally by using public cameras to pick faces from the crowd and cross check them with its national repository of images. Let's just say this facial technology isn't going to be used for lighthearted Japanese vocaloid hijinks or unlocking your electronic device. The use and scope of NGI, which kicked off a pilot program in February, will likely be questioned not just by black helicopter watchers but privacy advocates as well. Facial recognition has certainly been a touchy issue in privacy circles -- something Facebook learned firsthand in Germany. Meanwhile, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is already raising concerns about innocent civilians being mixed up or included in the database. Naturally, the FBI claims that the NGI program is in compliance with the U.S. Privacy Act. On the positive side, at least they didn't name it the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System.
Apple patent application imagines iPhones that learn the sweet sound of your voice
Button-loathing Apple really wants people to stop dirtying its devices with sticky fingerprints. That's why it's applied for a patent that should improve the frustrating experience of using iOS's voice control -- precisely the kind of update we've been awaiting since Apple bought Siri last year. With the help of a technology billed as "User profiling for voice input processing," your device would identify your voice, check against a library of words associated with you without having to trawl through its entire dictionary. We just hope Apple doesn't do away with physical inputs entirely -- we'd hate to broadcast to the world all the guilty pleasures we have loaded on our iPods.
