speech recognition

Amazon Has Acquired Yap, the Closest Thing to a Siri Clone It Can Find

Tricia Duryee in Commerce on November 9, 2011 at 2:34 pm PT

There are a lot of similarities between Amazon and Apple. The secrecy, the dedication to the consumer, the focus on devices and digital media, and now this: Siri.

Laryngitis Aside, Why Siri Is a Voice to Be Reckoned With

Ina Fried in Mobile on November 7, 2011 at 4:00 am PT

Siri may still be working to find her voice, but Apple’s young assistant shows a ton of promise.

Android Chief Says Your Phone Should Not Be Your Assistant

Ina Fried in AsiaD on October 19, 2011 at 11:30 am PT

In an interview, Rubin says that his philosophy is that a phone should be a tool for connecting people to each other, not for replacing human interaction.

Will Apple’s Siri Make Talking to Your Phone Seem Normal?

Ina Fried in Mobile on October 5, 2011 at 2:25 pm PT

Voice recognition has been common on cellphones since the 1990s, but capabilities have been limited, as has accuracy. Is Siri ready to allow speech techology to turn a corner?

Done With Silly Game Shows, IBM's Watson Finds a Job

Arik Hesseldahl in Enterprise on February 17, 2011 at 7:45 am PT

Having licked the puny humans on TV games shows, the Watson supercomputer, or at least one like it, will be put to work on ways to help doctors make better decisions.

Meet Flipboard: Mike McCue Talks About Stealth "Social Magazine" Start-Up That Just Nabbed $10.5 Million in Funding

Kara Swisher in News on July 20, 2010 at 8:56 pm PT

Say hello to an innovative new social magazine concept called Flipboard, which is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via a rich app on the Apple iPad. Co-founded by longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike McCue and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll in January, Flipboard decloaked itself tonight, announcing both a $10.5 million funding from top Silicon Valley power players and also the acquisition of Ellerdale, a relevancy search engine for the real-time Web.

An iPhone 4 Review Roundup

John Paczkowski in Mobile on June 22, 2010 at 3:09 pm PT

“This is really hot,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said of the iPhone 4 when he unveiled it at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month. And the pundits seem to agree. The first reviews of the device began rolling in Tuesday afternoon and they are largely glowing. After the jump, excerpts from a few of them.

A Voicemail Transcription Scandal in Britain

Marisa Taylor, Tech Reporter, The Wall Street Journal in News on July 24, 2009 at 7:33 am PT

SpinVox, a British company that converts voicemails into text with speech recognition technology, has been accused by the BBC of using humans at call centers to manually conduct the majority of the translations.

D7 Tech Demo: Siri

Oliver J. Chiang in D7 on May 28, 2009 at 12:00 pm PT

Many would-be augurs have been trying to pinpoint the moment the artificial intelligence overlord known as Skynet gets its start: Some may one day point to the launch of Siri. Siri is a virtual personal assistant, for your iPhone or computer, with a pedigree: It originated at the Stanford Research Institute and was spun out as an AI project financed by DARPA. Now, as an alternative to search, Siri is supposed to carry out tasks like finding your next outgoing flight or ordering a pizza by crawling the Web and conversing with the user, processing requests, responding and learning from the interaction. It will do this via a combination of technologies, including speech recognition, natural language processing and semantic Web search.

D7 Tech Demo: Fullpower

John Paczkowski in D7 on May 27, 2009 at 9:05 am PT

Philippe Kahn’s history of entrepreneurship is nearly as old as the PC itself. He developed software for the Micral N, one of the earliest commercial personal computers, back in 1973. As CEO of Borland Software, he touted himself the “barbarian” of the software industry and embraced that identity by holding one of the first press conferences for his company in a McDonald’s in Las Vegas during Comdex. Ousted from Borland in 1995, Kahn went on to found wireless synchronization outfit Starfish Software, which he sold to Motorola. He followed that up with LightSurf Technologies, a picture-messaging company acquired by Verisign in 2005. Today Philippe Kahn is at D7 as CEO of Fullpower, a company developing accelerometer-based hardware and software.