WebProNews

Tag: Voice Recognition

  • Facebook Just Bought A Voice Recognition Company

    Facebook has acquired Wit.ai, a company that builds voice recognition and natural language processing tools for developers. It has over 6,000 developers on its platform.

    The platform is open, which is a quality the startup clearly takes pride in.

    “For a long time I’ve been obsessed with building machines that understand human languages,” it says in a blog post. “18 months ago, we started Wit.ai with the vision that no solution is to be found in a closed, centralized, managed approach. We’ve been building an open, distributed, community-based platform that makes it easy for developers to build apps that users can talk to.

    The platform will remain open and free under Facebook’s ownership.

    On the acquisition, Wit.ai says, “It is an incredible acceleration in the execution of our vision. Facebook has the resources and talent to help us take the next step. Facebook’s mission is to connect everyone and build amazing experiences for the over 1.3 billion people on the platform – technology that understands natural language is a big part of that, and we think we can help.”

    TechCrunch, which first reported on the news, shares a statement from Facebook: “Wit.ai has built an incredible yet simple natural language processing API that has helped developers turn speech and text into actionable data. We’re excited to have them onboard.”

    As that report points out, Facebook has been looking for additional staff fro its Language Technology Group, which may be working on voice-to-text for Messenger.

    Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

    Images via Facebook, Wit.ai

  • Google Video Looks At ‘Science Of Talking With Computers’

    Google has a new video out, which it calls a “short film” about speech recognition. It starts with the early days and works its way up to the incredible technology that’s available today (including from Google, of course…okay, it’s pretty much all Google).

    The description says: “Language. Easy for humans to understand (most of the time), but not so easy for computers. This is a short film about speech recognition, language understanding, neural nets, and using our voices to communicate with the technology around us.”

    While you could look at the video as an ad for Google, it does serve as a pretty interesting reminder of how far this stuff has come.

    Image via YouTube

  • Bing Improves Voice Search On Windows Phone

    Bing has made some improvements to its voice recognition capabilities to make voice search on Windows Phone devices more accurate and faster.

    “Voice search is supposed to be seamless and efficient, but sometimes your phone misses important words and takes too long to return results, that aren’t always what you’re looking for,” a Bing spokesperson tells WebProNews. “Today, Bing is rolling out updates to it voice search on Windows Phone 8 that allows it to return results twice as fast as before and improves accuracy (word error rate) by 15 percent.”

    “”These improvements are a result of the work the Bing and Microsoft Research teams have been doing to advance Deep Neural Networks (DNN), technology that is inspired by the functioning of neurons in the brain,” the spokesperson adds.

    In a blog post, the Bing Speech team writes, “By coupling MSR’s major research breakthroughs in the use of DNNs with the large datasets provided by Bing’s massive index, the DNNs were able to learn more quickly and help Bing voice capabilities get noticeably closer to the way humans recognize speech. We also made a few improvements under the hood that allowed Bing to more easily identify speech patterns and cut through ambient and background noise – cutting down response time by half and improving the word error rate by 15 percent, even in noisy situations.”

    Bing says these improvements are just the beginning of tis work on improving speech and voice capabilities across MIcrosoft devices and services.

  • Voice Recognition Comes To Chrome (Stable)

    Google launched Chrome 25 beta last month, which included support for voice commands via the Web Speech API. Now, voice recognition has come to the stable release.

    Developers can use the API to to integrate speech recognition capabilities into their web apps, so Chrome users can benefit from the feature.

    Google has a demo here, if you want to see how it works.

    The release also disables silent extension installs in Chrome for Windows.

    “This keeps Chrome fast and safe by ensuring that you consent to every extension that’s installed on your computer,” says Google software engineer Glen Shires.

    The new features will come with the auto-update as the release is rolled out.

  • iPhone 4S’ Siri: Now With More Easter Eggs

    iPhone 4S’ Siri: Now With More Easter Eggs

    From what we know about Siri, Apple’s new voice assistant program for the iPhone 4S, is that it looks like a rather interesting addition to iOS. We know that it will give users the ability to transcribe text messages, schedule calendar events, set reminders, check the weather, make dinner reservations and much more, all with the power of their voice.

    We are also finding out that Siri has quite the sense of humor.

    One of the big draws of Siri is that it will communicate with you, in order specify the parameters of your request. For instance, if you ask it to send an email to someone it might ask whether you want to send it to their work or home address. Basically, Siri talks back to you.

    Joshua Topolsky at This is My Next has posted some of the best Easter eggs hidden within the Siri program. These interesting responses to questions already serve as the source of a new tumblr, called Shit That Siri Says.

    If you ask Siri what the meaning of life is, you might get one of the following responses:

    “42.”
    “I can’t answer that now, but give me some time to write a very long play in which nothing happens.”
    “To think about questions like that.”

    The best one so far has to be this reference to a certain seminal sci-fi film –

    Some questions that you pose to Siri will elicit suggestions:

    The Shit That Siri Says tumblr is currently populated by This is My Next’s finds exclusively – but when the iPhone 4S is released to the public on Friday morning the blog might explode with submissions. Who knows what awesome pop culture Easter eggs exist within the Siri program? Shit That Siri Says could wind up becoming an incredibly fun little blog.

    What are you hoping it will include? What’s the first question you would ask Siri to try to find a funny response? I’m pretty sure that mine would be “Surely you can’t be serious?”

    Apparently, Siri already takes the form of HAL 9000 in at least one instance. This video wonders what would happen if Siri turned out to be more like GLaDOS from the Portal games.