voice recognition
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Dragon Dictate for Mac now available
That didn't take long. Earlier this year, Nuance Communications took over the MacSpeech product, with the intention of improving what was already a good application. That has now been accomplished, and today Dragon Dictate is available for the Macintosh platform -- a reasonably priced upgrade for MacSpeech users. The new version offers easier editing, the ability to switch between different microphones, and it uses a computer voice to proofread your dictated documents. The speech engine has been updated to new state-of-the-art technology. It's nice to see speech recognition on the Mac that finally has feature parity with the PC versions. There are some nice new and unexpected features like saying 'search Google for Greek restaurants', and you can do a Spotlight search by voice.
Kinect won't support voice recognition in some countries until 2011, putting on airs won't help
"If you see it, just say it," says Microsoft's Kinect, but only in the US, UK, Mexico and Japan to start -- those are the only four countries that will support Kinect voice control by the motion-sensing peripheral's November launch. So said Microsoft PR manager Lidia Pitzalis in an interview with Eurogamer Spain, adding that Germany, Italy, France and even Canada and Spain would have to wait for a Spring 2011 update for additional language support. Microsoft claims it's a matter of accents throwing off the voice recognition, as the company's already had to build separate software versions for US and UK English, but if you're an Italian who can fake a good Cockney, you're still out of luck, as Microsoft's reportedly disabling voice control entirely in said regions until it can formally support it. And game companies wonder why we try so hard to hack those DVD drives... Update: Canada will in fact have voice support, according to Microsoft. So long as you speak English and not French.
Vlingo bows to Google Voice Actions, makes Android version free of charge
When Google Navigation hit the scene, it sounded the death knell for paid GPS on Android, so you can imagine the doom and gloom at Vlingo HQ last week when Google released the similar Voice Actions for free. As it turns out, however, Vlingo's not going to give up that easily; Vlingo for Android, once a $10 download, is now free as well. In a surprisingly gracious blog post that genuinely congratulates Google on the accomplishment, CEO Dave Grannan explains that he wants Android users to be able to freely compare the services as Vlingo adds features further down the road, and makes one valid point in his firm's favor -- you can try Vlingo now if you've got Android 2.0 or above, but Google's service only runs on Froyo. Interestingly enough, Vlingo on Android was the only version that actually charged; on Nokia, Blackberry and Windows Mobile, however, you could purchase a "Plus" license. Perhaps the company's not quite as generous as we thought, but there's still no arguing with a free voice command service that also reads your email aloud -- go ahead and give it a try.
Ford's SYNC learns 100x more voice commands, integrates Nuance technology
We'll be honest -- we weren't the biggest fans of SYNC from the onset, but that had more to do with its insistence on playing Run DMC on our request for Naughty By Nature during a cross-town CES run than anything else. Now, Ford remains one of the few automakers that actually bothers to update their navigation systems on a consistent basis, and while SYNC is still far from perfect, it's getting a rather significant update today. The introduction of MyFord Touch brings the amount of commands that SYNC understands up to 10,000 -- that's a pretty big jump from 100, where it began. Following in BMW's footsteps, Ford is also integrating voice control technology from Nuance, which allows drivers to speak "more naturally" to the system rather than having to memorize a few hundreds first-level snippets. Unfortunately, we still think voice control within vehicles is too slow; much like Windows Vista, there are simply too many confirmation prompts, too many forks in the decision tree and not enough of an overall benefit to chose it over handling things with your digits. Feel free to disagree and pick this up on your 2011 Ford Edge, but be sure to view the video past the jump before getting all hot and bothered.
Kinect-optimized Xbox 360 Dashboard preview
We just got a look at the new Kinect Dashboard-lite for the Xbox 360. In some ways, it's pretty charming, with fun, jazzed up icons (when you hover over them they tilt and show off depth), a simplistic layout, and some great voice controls. The downside is this all comes at the cost of a brand new, fairly redundant interface for accessing functions that are already available with your Xbox 360 controller in the regular Dashboard. Still, there's no denying the joy of waving a hand to log in, hovering over icons to select channels (though the wait-to-click mechanism strikes us as eventually frustrating), and scrubbing through media with very intuitive gestures. The best part is the voice control, however, allowing you to speak "Xbox" and then a command like play, pause, back, forward, stop, Zune, etc. It's ripe for abuse (pausing your S.O.'s seventh Netflix screening of The Constant Gardner ad nauseam), but Microsoft says it's working on eliminating random commands that might seep into conversation. Our biggest worry is that we're going to see confusion and fragmentation of functionality with the divergent UI requirements that Kinect apps and regular Dashboard apps require -- we can't imagine the Facebook or Last.fm folks being super thrilled at creating an all-new app just to support Microsoft's whims, but we're told just such apps are in the works. Is the existing Dashboard really so complicated that Kinect couldn't control it? Check out a video of this puzzling Kinectasticness after the break. %Gallery-95214%
Would you buy a voice-controlled camera, or perhaps a DSLR with touchsceen?
Do you talk to your digital camera? Perhaps stroke its glossy LCD? If a pair of recent patent applications are any indication, those mildly creepy gestures might one day actually do something. Sony's just laid claim to a DSLR touchscreen that can be manipulated by thumb even while the rest of one's face is smushed up against the viewfinder, and Canon's got its eye on technology that lets shooters activate advanced camera functions using simple voice control. The latter wouldn't be limited to "fire," but could potentially be directed to switch modes, stops and even zoom in and out of the frame. It wouldn't necessarily substitute for a remote as there are just two modes, "close-talking" for speech uttered when using the viewfinder, and "non-close-talking" when you line up shots on the LCD display. Neat as they are, these alternatives to physical controls make some at Engadget HQ quite sad, but we understand that minimalism is the word of the day.
Quad-copter responds to your voice, isn't coming to a toy store near you (video)
Hey, remember Taiyo's voice controlled toy helicopter from last year? This is way cooler. Like, way cooler. It's an autonomous quad-copter created by the Robust Robotics Group at MIT. It hovers and flies a bit like the AR.Drone that had us smitten at CES this past January, but this one has a lot more brains. It response to natural (though slowly delivered) language voice commands that look to be processed on an iPhone before being sent to the helo. In the video embedded below you'll see it responding to the command "Fly past room 124 then face the windows and go up." Sure enough, it does as instructed, and while we don't know how many takes that particular feat of robotic subservience took to pull off, we're suitably impressed. Mind you, this is a research project and not any product ever destined for retail, so after watching that video a few more times we'll just go back to crashing our Picco Zs into the walls -- and each other.
Sexist computers: male voices are apparently harder to recognize than female ones
Researchers up at the University of Edinburgh have determined that the male voice is harder for voice recognition software to pick up and understand than its female counterpart. This conclusion was reached after telephone conversation recordings were run through a battery of tests, which revealed that men seem to say "umm" and "err" more often, while also identifying that the greatest difficulties arise with words that sound similar and can arise in the same context, such as "him" and "them." Equally troubling is the first word in a sentence, as it comes without context and therefore doesn't benefit from any predictive assistance. Done in partnership with Stanford, the study was aimed at identifying and overcoming the major hurdles to producing usable and reliable voice recognition -- something Google's universal voice translator phone is also aiming to achieve. Let's hope somebody figures out how to get around all our hemming and hawing, eh?
Vlingo 2 adds more voice power to iPhone
In the burgeoning market for iPhone voice recognition apps, the free Dragon Dictate clearly holds the top spot. In fact, this paragraph was dictated using DragonDictate (with some minor edits after the fact). However, the application doesn't always shine when it comes to getting your text quickly and easily into different places where you might want to use it. You can send an e-mail or a text message if you want to, but you can't update your Facebook status or send a Twitter message without copying and pasting. Performing a search requires an entirely separate app. To make your dictation process easier -- at least when it comes to getting your text to go where you want, when you want -- there's the latest update to the Vlingo app, which we first reviewed last June. Vlingo 2.0 is trying to up the ante for text recognition by putting all the 'next step' options in one convenient place. You can search (Google, Yahoo, or Bing), find map items, dial your contacts (with optional contact name upload to Vlingo's servers to improve recognition) and update your Facebook or Twitter status. For email or SMS, you have two in-app purchase options to extend the free app's capabilities; it's $6.99 for either SMS or email action, $9.99 for both. Vlingo has gotten a thorough UI overhaul in this new version, and it's quite a bit easier to use than it was. The dictation button can be used in hold-down or tap-to-talk mode, and the app can be set to recognize speech on launch for maximum speed. You can specify what action you want by speaking it: "Email Joey, Subject how about some coffee, Message Got time to meet me at Starbucks? You're buying!" will create and address an outgoing email for you, all in one step.
Siri for iPhone is like the proverbial Genie in a bottle
We're getting closer and closer to some of the stuff we see it science fiction literature and films. Siri [iTunes link] is a small Silicon Valley startup with a really breakthrough product that for now only works on the iPhone. Here's the deal. You download the free app, start it up, and tell it what you want. It could be "Will it snow in Des Moines today?" or "Where can I find the nearest burger" or it could be "Find the nearest parks". It parses your comments, runs out to the web for a few seconds and comes back with a lot of suggestions. It gives you buttons to call the places you've found, or to show them on Google Maps and get you directions. I tried to get a bit fancier saying "Make me a reservation for 2 at the nearest Olive Garden tonight at 7." The app figured out Olive Garden didn't take reservations through their service, but it provided me a number for the nearest Olive Garden and offered to map it.
Hey Canada! Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search now in your app store
This will please many of our neighbors to the north. Nuance, the creator of Dragon Dictation [U.S. iTunes link] and Dragon Search [U.S. iTunes link] for the iPhone and iPod touch say the U.S. version of the apps is now available in the Canadian iTunes store. These versions support U.S. English and will use U.S. English spellings ("center" vs. "centre", "color" vs. "colour", etc.). Canadian users will want to verify that their iPhone or iPod Touch's Region Format is set to Canada (see Dragon Search FAQ -> General) to search Canada specific content. Nuance wants our readers to know that they are working on new dialects and new versions for other countries, and they hope to have some further announcements soon. The Dragon apps are free, and have become quite a hit with users who can dictate email or text messages using the dictation app. Your words are sent to the Nuance servers where they are returned as text in a couple of seconds. The search app lets you search Google, Bing, Twitter, YouTube, iTunes and Wikipedia by simply telling the app what you want.
Bada Bing! Microsoft delivers Bing search app
Search is really getting interesting these days. Microsoft late last night released Bing [iTunes link] for the iPhone -- a full featured free app offering search, movies, maps, and directions, all with voice control. It's notable that Microsoft is going after iPhone mind-share after Steve Ballmer famously dissed the iPhone more than 2 years ago. He's had to sit back and watch the iPhone eclipse Windows Mobile phones in the marketplace, which can't be pleasant, but business is business, and Microsoft is pushing the Bing search suite of tools hard. After spending some time with it last night and this morning, I can say that it works pretty well. I think on-screen it is more attractive than the Google Mobile app offering [iTunes link] and the voice control is about as accurate. On the Bing home screen there are direct links to images, movies, maps, businesses, news and directions. It inverts the Google method, where you do a search, then select, for example, images. I think I prefer the Bing hierarchy as being more logical. The voice search isn't perfect. It especially had trouble with addresses. You can use Bing, as you can Google Maps, as a low end navigation app, but of course no voice directions as yet. Some of the icons, like back and forward seem a bit too close together, but the icons are serviceable. Like Google, you can search for a business, then click to dial it directly, get directions, or read reviews. Business categories are well thought out, and easy to navigate. You can access an iPhone friendly version of Bing from Safari on the iPhone, but of course there is no voice input and it is more cumbersome to use, so I think having an app makes sense. For free, there is no reason not to download Bing and see if you like it. I'm hoping Microsoft will aggressively update the app, and continue to add features. I think if you grab it, you'll use it. Bing requires an iPhone and iPod touch with iPhone OS 3.0 or later. %Gallery-80436%
Uh oh! Google releasing free turn by turn GPS app for Android
Just when you thought it was safe to buy a nav app for the iPhone, Google goes and announces a free app for Android, and says it's going to be available for the iPhone if Apple will let it into the App Store. The app, called Google Maps Navigation, will ship with phones running the Android OS 2.0 and includes search by voice, search for points of interest by voice while in route, satellite and street view, and support for a hardware dock for 'certain devices.' This won't be great news for TomTom, Navigon, or any of the rest. Google says the app is U.S. only for now, and will be seen first on the Verizon Droid which will appear in November. Talk about disruption! With the FCC watching it will be most interesting to see if Apple allows the app onto the iPhone and, whether yes or no, the effect on Android sales. I can't wait for all the fur to fly. You can watch a video of the app in action in this YouTube clip. Admit it. You want this!
Lighthouse SQ7 MID brings voice recognition to Facebook, Twitter
If you're savvy enough to want to use the Facebook Mobile app, we're guessing you're savvy enough to get it up and running on your phone or portable -- so buying an additional device for responding to friend requests seems a little silly. Hopefully, AdelaVoice (a company that develops voice-enabled apps for the Internet and social networks) has more plans for its Lighthouse SQ7 than what we see here. Based on the Linux-powered SmartQ7 Internet tablet, the heart of this bad boy is a UI that allows you access to Facebook, Twitter, the web, and an image slideshow. But that ain't all! Taking advantage of Webkit's integrated voice recognition, this thing will let you input text through the mic -- perfect for posting to Facebook or tweeting sans stylus. Perhaps for some people these features might be a big deal, but we've been asking around -- and we have yet to find anyone who'll 'fess up. We have to admit, though -- what this thing does do, it seems to do pretty well. Tell you what, AdelaVoice -- add JDate and Classmates.com and we'll give the thing another shot, okay? Video after the break. [Via Best Tablet Review]
2010 BMWs boast improved Nuance voice control system
BMWs aren't exactly lacking for technology these days, but it looks like the new 2010 models come packing a little something extra to make your life even easier. As Nuance Communications is all too happy to announce itself, the new vehicles boast an improved voice control system from the company that promises to allow for a "more conversational dialogue between drivers and BMW navigation and entertainment systems." That, naturally, gets paired with BMW's own iDrive system, and includes some Sync-like abilities to search for music by voice, as well as a new "One-Shot Destination Entry" feature to let folks enter a destination address in one simple voice command. It can even apparently recognize several different language in parallel, letting a French-speaking driver, for instance, search for a German song title or English album title.
Sony to offer voice recognition, image enlargement tech in upcoming SDK
Sony has been working on distributing a number of new technologies, already available in some PS3 programs. The first is voice recognition software, employed by SingStar, that allows the PS3 to quickly recognize up to 20 different languages. In SingStar, players are able to quickly go through the song library by simply calling out various commands or speaking the names of artists and songs. While the technology is currently exclusive to Sony, a report by Dig Info reveals that the company plans on making it available to all PS3 developers in future iterations of the console's software development kit.Another tech developed by Sony allows the PS3 and PSP to quickly zoom in on massive images. Already used in a Japanese release calendar program (available for free from the Japanese PlayStation Store), this technology streams massive amounts of visual data -- including video -- quickly and scales it appropriately. Like the SingStar voice recognition tools, this tech will be available for developers in an upcoming SDK update. We're not exactly sure how games will be able to take advantage of this, but it certainly looks impressive.Check out videos after the break.[Via Engadget]Source - High-Resolution Enlargement TechnologySource - PS3 Voice Recognition
Video: High-res image enlargement tech for PS3 and PSP takes extreme closeups to a new level
The GigaPan has opened new doors in ridiculously high-resolution imagery, creating pictures so huge our feeble human minds can't hope to comprehend them. Sony's getting in on the action, not so much with the idea of capturing historic events at gigapixel resolutions, but providing the same sort of effect by linking multiple documents and items together and allowing you to zoom from one to the next. The video after the break shows a number of demonstrations, including what looks to be a release calendar that, inside each cell, contains high-resolution photos and even videos of whatever is releasing that day. Hidden advertising is also possible, like a mosquito on a man's face tagged with an ad only apparent after you've gotten uncomfortably close to the poor man's face. The adult entertainment opportunities are endless. Also demo'd is a new voice recognition library for the PS3, dubbed PS3VR, which can take you straight to your Cindi Lauper albums even if you're not a girl and are seemingly disinterested in having fun. That tech isn't quite so interesting, but it and the high-resolution libraries are intended for release to developers... eventually. Read - High-Resolution Enlargement TechnologyRead - PS3 Voice Recognition
Video: ASUS EeeTop PC ET2002T gets touched up
We might already have all the specalicious details on the new EeeTops from ASUS, but it never hurts to see one in action, right? Taking center stage here is the voice-activated widgetry ASUS has added to its Windows 7 install, allowing you to check the weather, play music, and even initiate Skype calls solely via the awesomeness of your voice. Expected to retail at €599 in Europe, the 20-inch ET2002T definitely looks sleek, though its screen is glossy enough for the camera girl to wave at us surreptitiously a number of times. Check it out, but be warned, there's a small bit of salty language midway through, which is as inappropriate for the office as it is hilarious. [Via Notebook Italia]
Let your Mac take dictation
MacSpeech Dictate has now been upgraded to version 1.5, giving the application more accuracy and a new vocabulary editor. The update also includes a new English profile option, allowing you to indicate if your speech has North American, Southern North American, or a Latino North American accent.The software also includes the addition of the top 100 websites to the "Jump to" command option.This is the first update of MacSpeech Dictate since last February.As I did in my last post on this software, I dictated this article completely by voice. It appears that the software is more accurate in recognizing my speech. Although I upgraded from an earlier version, the software did require me to retrain, which involves reading a short story that takes about five minutes. In my dictation for this post the software missed the word 'and' once and typed 'hand'. I used the 'scratch that' command, re-tried the word, and it worked well.As I dictated some other documents using both Microsoft Word and Pages from Apple, I was impressed at the large vocabulary of the program. It even recognized the word O-ring, which is pretty technical, and could have been easily misinterpreted.If you're already an owner of MacSpeech Dictate, it's probably worth update for the new features. If you haven't tried dictating into your Macintosh, and have a need to do so, the program is worth a try. The developer has licensed the Dragon recognition engine from Nuance Communications, which is the premier voice recognition software on the PC. This newest version of MacSpeech is available for US $199, or as a US $54.95 for current owners of the application. To run it, you'll need to be on Leopard version 10.5.6 or above.
Recent Apple patent filing speaks of stealth biometric security on iPhone, other insane insanity
Recent patent fillings by Apple that AppleInsider has dug up point to the company adding several new methods of insuring the security of its devices for users. The new filings cite biometric authentication methods that would excite Ethan Hunt -- including installation of a hidden sensor behind the screen that would recognize the user's fingerprint when touched, and / or a front-facing camera for retinal recognition. The filing also suggests further possibilities, such as the device being capable of recognizing the user's voice, or collecting DNA samples for recognition via genetic code. We've heard plenty of semi-speculative tech tales in the past, so we always take this stuff with a grain of salt, but Apple seems to be moving forward at least into the research phase of such endeavors. To the future we go! There's one more fantastic scribble after the break, hit the read link for more details.
