AllThingsD » speech recognition

Taking Dictation

Walter S. Mossberg — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 21:47:31 +0000

Can I hook up my iPhone to my iMac and dictate into a word processor? Or should I just dictate into the Notes app on the iPhone and send that by email? I am executor of my mom’s estate and she left a lot of written memories that I want to compile into a book for family members. It would be a lot easier to dictate than to type them all.

As far as I know, the iPhone can’t be used as a dictation appendage for a computer. You’d have to dictate into a document on the phone and transfer that to the computer. But you don’t have to use Apple’s Notes app.

There are many apps on iPhone and Android that can produce documents in Microsoft Word format which, when transferred to a PC or Mac, can be opened right in Word. Examples are Quickoffice, Documents To Go, and Apple’s own Pages. You can use dictation with all of these.

Enjoyed your article on using smartphones to turn dictation into text. I have recently become interested in various inexpensive devices that can record professors’ lectures into text. Do you think that the iPhone or Android phones can do that from a long distance, say, in back of the class?

Anything is possible, but it’s not what the dictation features are designed to do, and I didn’t test that scenario. I doubt it would be very reliable or accurate.

The microphones on smartphones are typically designed to focus on a single voice close to the phone and to ignore the details of more distant sounds. It might work in a small, quiet seminar room with a professor whose voice is loud and clear, but I’m skeptical it would work in the back row of a large hall.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

AT&T Aims to Avoid Opening Can of Worms as It Opens Up Its Network

Ina Fried — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:35:57 +0000

The windowless building in Lower Manhattan may not indicate it, but AT&T Labs is trying to be more open.

Using an area normally home to its network security team, Ma Bell had a science fair of sorts on Thursday, showing off a number of the technologies that it has been cooking up in its labs. Many of the projects on display take advantage of different pieces of network data that AT&T now makes available to developers.

The various projects and booths paint an interesting future where doors can be opened by voice, a chip in the phone or even the electrical signals that travel through our hands, to name just a few of the gee-whiz technologies on display. But whether this future is bright or grim depends a bit on how one feels about being tracked.

Cellphones are indeed powerful devices these days — portable computers that know who we are, where we are and how we pay for things. Many of the projects on display Thursday aim to combine that knowledge in useful ways.

One application, for example would allow parents to keep tabs on their kids while they are driving — getting alerts if they text and drive or neglect to wear their seatbelts.

Another project nearby shows something akin to Caller ID on steroids. Today’s Caller ID shares only one’s phone number, but AT&T has the potential to share a lot more. One demo imagined what it would be like to share location and all manner of other information with a person you are dialing. Such uses could make it easy when, for instance, one is ordering a pizza.

Data combinations clearly have downsides, though. Imagine how hard it would be to cancel an outing with friends if they knew one was in Atlantic City, rather than sick in bed.

There are two questions that companies need to ask when releasing new services, says Edward Amoroso, senior VP and chief security officer for AT&T.

The first, Amoroso says, is about the art of the possible. “What sort of technology could you actually do?”

Then, he said, it is important to ask a second question. “What technology are people going to be comfortable with?”

Thursday’s science fair was more about the first question than the second.

Not all of the projects were as fraught with controversy. One of the more popular demos was one AT&T has been showing for a couple of years now called “Air Graffiti,” which allows users to tag physical locations with art, photos, sounds or other information — all without the risk of irking the property owner. AT&T has been working on the idea for a decade, but the technology needed to make it a reality has only recently become widely available.

Locations can be as specific as a single spot or as big as the earth and users can choose to share their graffiti publicly or with only a small collection of friends or family. Graffiti can also be timed to last for a short duration or set to live forever.

AT&T also used Thursday’s event to launch Watson, a new speech-recognition technology that it says is the result of a million hours of research and development and is the subject of 600 patents. The platform can recognize natural speech patterns and translate among six different languages.

Several of the technologies on display are also making their way into AT&T’s latest “Rethink Possible” campaign spots.

AT&T, like other carriers, have been increasingly opening up various features of their network — even core things like location and messaging and payment — so that developers can create more sophisticated programs.

Opening up their most valuable assets — the networks — is a clear risk for the carriers. At the same time, each is looking to avoid becoming just a “dumb pipe” for which they are paid a toll that barely covers the cost of each generation of network upgrades.

Things are indeed at a critical juncture, says Chief Technology Officer Krish Prabhu.

“There’s a cultural transformation and we are right in the middle of it,” Prabhu told AllThingsD. In a couple of years, the result will be clear, he said. “Either we changed the company for the good or we missed the boat.”

One of the capabilities that AT&T is studying is whether to allow, for example, the ability for applications to send text messages on behalf of users, much the way that the iPhone or Android sends notifications. Striking the right balance between usefulness and spam will be key.

Also front of mind for AT&T is making sure that nothing it does compromises the overall security of its network, something Amoroso said remains his top priority.

Figuring out how to make money will be another key. Prabhu said that AT&T has some goals in terms of getting a certain percentage of new revenue by opening up its network. However, he declined to reveal any of the specific numbers.

“I think the network has a lot of capability other than just connectivity,” he said. “It is a business objective and there is clearly an understanding that at some level a certain percentage of our revenue will come from this.”

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

Tricia Duryee — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 22:34:27 +0000

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.

Amazon has not returned calls or emails seeking comment, but we have confirmed independently that Charlotte, N.C.-based Yap has been acquired by Amazon.

Reports of the acquisition surfaced earlier today after CLT, a Charlotte-based blog, connected a couple of obscure dots. First, it tracked down an SEC filing that shows that as of Sept. 8, Yap was acquired by Yarmuth Dion. Then, it discovered that Yarmouth Dion has the same mailing address as Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.

Media reports immediately jumped to the conclusion that Amazon was interested in the company’s speech recognition technology so it could compete with Siri, the voice-controlled assistant found on Apple’s newest iPhone.

And, from what we dug up, that sounds about right.

Most recently, Yap’s servers were being used by Sprint and others to convert voicemails to text. It was being shipped on a majority of Sprint’s Android handsets. Yap also had an iPhone app.

On Oct. 20, Yap voicemail was discontinued.

But the company, founded by brothers Igor and Victor Jablokov, started out in a different direction. Four years ago, the company was eager to build technology that allowed people to interact with Web services using speech recognition. The company, which raised about $10 million, presented at the TechCrunch40 event in 2007.

At the time, the idea was a little far-fetched.

Wireless networks weren’t very fast, not many people owned smartphones and distribution was tough because of the lack of app stores. With many of those problems resolved, we heard the 50-employee company was beginning to return to its roots. Now, it works for Amazon.

We can hear it now:

– “Yap, what are this season’s most popular boots?”

– “Yap, buy me the first Harry Potter novel.”

– “Yap, what’s the new hit song from Justin Bieber?”

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

Ina Fried — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 11:00:52 +0000

Sure, she may be a bit flighty, and she only knows how to answer a few questions. But don’t let Siri’s youthful shortcomings fool you.

Apple’s personal assistant, which debuted on the iPhone 4S, shows the qualities one wants in an assistant. What she lacks in know-how and dependability, she makes up for by being whip-smart, a quick study and even a bit of a wiseass.

Google’s Andy Rubin may be publicly dismissive, but both Google and Microsoft also know that voice will be the key input method in the future — especially on the phone, with its touchscreen keyboards, even the best of which are still a pain today.

Siri already shows flashes of brilliance. While the assistant app only does a handful of tasks, one can ask those to be done in almost any construction and she will hammer away. Ask her the weather and she will tell you; ask how hot it is, or whether you need an umbrella or sunscreen, and she will tell you that as well.

It is only a matter of time before Apple expands her repertoire to handle more tasks. The company said as much during the announcement of Siri, saying she would be slapped with a beta tag until she finished her training and her foreign-language requirement.

In the meantime, Google and Microsoft are investing heavily in speech, as well. Microsoft spent a fair chunk of change buying Tellme a few years back, and has been working to make it a key component of Windows Phone and the Kinect, among other products. Google, meanwhile, has already built a series of “voice actions” into Android, and one can expect it to expand those efforts.

That said, Apple would be well-served to get its servers performing better. Siri has been frequently inaccessible since her launch. And while everyone likes a smart assistant, those who can’t reliably fetch coffee can find themselves quickly unemployed.

Android Chief Says Your Phone Should Not Be Your Assistant

Ina Fried — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:30:21 +0000

Andy Rubin thinks there is a lot of potential for phones to be more useful companions, but says he is not interested in turning Android devices into personal assistants.

“I don’t believe that your phone should be an assistant,” the Android chief said in an interview on Wednesday just after appearing on stage at AsiaD. “Your phone is a tool for communicating. You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone.”

Of course, several million people have already gone out and bought the iPhone 4S, which has as one of its chief selling points the voice-controlled assistant known as Siri.

Rubin said the jury is still out on whether people will take to talking to their phones to control them.

“To some degree it is natural for you to talk to your phone,” Rubin said, but historically that has meant talking to another person. As for talking to your phone without actually trying to connect to another person, Rubin says he’s not so sure. “We’ll see how pervasive it gets.”

Rubin noted that one of his Android co-founders, Rich Miner, had a cellphone speech company called Wildfire, while General Magic also pursued the idea.

“This isn’t a new notion,” he said. “In projecting the future, I think Apple did a good job of figuring out when the technology was ready to be consumer-grade.”

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

Ina Fried — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 21:25:52 +0000

While Siri was probably the biggest technology advance that Apple introduced on Tuesday, it remains unclear just how ready smartphone owners are to spend time talking to their phones.

The fact is that voice recognition has been a part of cellphones since long before their was an iPhone. Voice dialing has been commonplace since the 1990s. The issue has always been how good is the recognition and how powerful are the capabilities.

What Apple is promising with Siri is a leap forward in both the amount of things one can do, as well as in the ability to do those things using just natural speech. While prior voice control handled things like dialing and playing a particular song, Siri promises to answer all manner of queries, regardless of how they are phrased.

Apple is not alone, though, in pursuing speech as a more dominant form of input.

Both Google and Microsoft have been beefing up the voice capabilities of their products as well. The just-released Mango version of Windows Phone allows a user to have text messages read to them and to dictate replies. That’s in addition to existing Windows Phone features that stem from the company’s Tellme acquisition. Microsoft is also working to expand its use of speech technology into all manner of other devices from cars to Windows laptops to the Xbox.

[ See post to watch video ]

Android, meanwhile, has an app that adds a variety of “voice actions” to Android, including the ability to dictate a memo, get directions, search the Web and more.

Beyond the competitive issues, though, there is also the question of just how cool it will be to talk to one’s phone. If Apple can convince people it is cool, there is a lot of opportunity there. That said, Siri has also debuted to plenty of mockery.

A Twitter user posing as HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey” got in a couple good one-liners.

“Siri thinks she’s so cool because she has voice recognition but can she lip read? That’s the sign of a truly awesome computer,” @HAL9000 posted. Others have noted that the name Siri sounds a bit like some not pleasant words in certain languages, such as Japanese, where it sounds a bit like a word for buttocks. Of course, almost any name can be twisted into something not so nice, as this classic Nicholas Cage Saturday Night Live sketch reminds us.

I had a brief chance to play around with Siri yesterday and was impressed that it could handle queries seemingly no matter how they were phrased.

“Do I have a meeting at 2?” or “How hot is it?” all worked. The query “Where can I get a taco?” brings up a list of nearby Mexican restaurants and their Yelp ratings.

There are some limitations. Siri, for example, lets one hear an incoming text message and dictate a reply. However, there doesn’t appear to be a way to have that dictated message read back to make sure that Siri got everything correct.

For now, Siri is in beta and only works in a couple of languages, though Apple is promising additional features and language support to come.

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

Arik Hesseldahl — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 15:45:57 +0000

Hot on the heels of last night’s big victory on the TV game show “Jeopardy” over two human champions, the most famous computer in the world today, or at least one just like it, appears to have found a respectable job.

Nuance Communications, a software company best known for its Dragon Naturally Speaking line of speech-recognition software, today announced a research agreement with IBM to explore ways to use the Watson system and its deep analytics technology in the health care industry.

The agreement calls for the companies to combine IBM’s Deep Question Answering, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning capabilities with Nuance’s speech recognition and Clinical Language Understanding, which is basically speech recognition tuned to the unique needs of doctors and other health care pros. They expect products resulting from the research to hit the market within two years. Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine are also getting involved.

The hope is that Watson’s ability to analyze the meaning and context of spoken language and quickly sort through the information in it to find precise answers can help humans arrive at decisions faster, and arrive at answers they might not have otherwise thought of. A doctor mulling a patient’s diagnosis could use Watson to quickly check medical literature and help evaluate a decision.

Nuance has a huge health care segment, accounting for a little less than half its sales. The division includes Dragon Medical–desktop software for doctors–and eScription, which docs use to phone in comments that are converted to text that’s entered into medical records. It’s also been building voice-recognition apps for Apple’s iPhone, both for consumers and for doctors. IBM and Nuance will jointly invest in the research project, and IBM has licensed access to the Watson technology to Nuance.

Nuance itself is an interesting company. Spun out of Xerox in 1999, it started out in the scanning and text-recognition software business, and then in 2001 scooped up the assets of the bankrupt Belgian outfit Lernout and Hauspie using a combination of debt and cash raised in a private placement from the state of Wisconsin’s investment board. It turned out that speech recognition’s time had come, and as sales of Dragon improved, it proceeded to roll up scores of other companies in the speech- and text-recognition game, including one founded by Alexander Graham Bell himself. Sales were north of a $1 billion for the first time in the year ended September 2010, and its shares have improved considerably over the last year, though given its size, the stock often moves on takeover rumors.

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

Kara Swisher — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 03:56:38 +0000

Today, BoomTown gassed up the MINI and headed down to see one of the more innovative new start-ups I have encountered of late.

That would be a 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 (AAPL) iPad.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In this social magazine, there are pull quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of content linked out to. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on Twitter or Facebook.

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.

The funders include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of high-profile investors, such as Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moscovitz, angel investor Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. (NWS) exec Peter Chernin.

Flipboard currently has about 20 employees at its downtown Palo Alto, Calif., HQ.

“Flipboard is a social magazine filled with all the the things your friends are sharing,” said McCue, who co-founded Tellme, the speech recognition service acquired by Microsoft (MSFT). “We’re trying to bring the timeless principles of print to social media.”

(You can read The Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret’s review of Flipboard here.)

McCue left Tellme a year ago and was casting about for a new start-up when he settled on creating a new way to digest and present the noisy flood of information being spewed 24/7 by social networks.

Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr, who backed Tellme, said he was immediately intrigued by the idea.

“It is at once intimate and alive and beautiful,” he said in an interview with me earlier today. “This is the next wave of social media and redefines what magazine is…and I think it will be one of the defining apps on the iPad.”

Right now, the Flipboard app is free and the business plan is advertising and some possible subscription scenarios.

Ellen Pao, also of Kleiner and a member of Flipboard’s board, said she hoped publishers, whose Web sites are reconfigured from tweets and other social links by the app, will welcome the new distribution format.

“Traditional publishing is facing a crossroads and this imagines it from the ground up,” she said. “I hope it paves the way.”

We’ll see about old media reactions, which has been decidedly mixed to aggregation apps like this.

The New York Times (NYT), for example, attacked rather than embraced another terrific news reading iPad app called Pulse, accusing it of misusing its content.

It was a stupid move against inexorable concepts such as Pulse and Flipboard, which are beginning to make sense of the changing digital information landscape.

Here’s the video interview with McCue, followed by the official press releases about Flipboard:

[ See post to watch video ]

FLIPBOARD LAUNCHES WORLD’S FIRST SOCIAL MAGAZINE

INSPIRED BY THE BEAUTY OF PRINT AND DESIGNED FOR iPAD, FLIPBOARD TRANSFORMS THE SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERIENCE

Raises $10.5MM From Legendary Investors KPCB and Index Ventures and Media Innovators Including Jack Dorsey, Dustin Moskovitz, Ashton Kutcher and The Chernin Group

Acquires Ellerdale, Names Arthur van Hoff CTO

FORTUNE BRAINSTORM TECH–ASPEN, COLORADO – JULY 21, 2010–Founded by Mike McCue, former CEO of Tellme, and Evan Doll, former senior iPhone engineer at Apple®, Flipboard™ began a quest today to transform how people discover and share content by combining the beauty and ease of print with the power of social media. Flipboard also announced the immediate availability of it’s Flipboard App for iPad™, a social magazine that brings to life the stories, photos, news and updates being shared across Twitter and Facebook. Flipboard’s first public demo will happen at the FORTUNE Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colorado at 4:40pm MDT tomorrow.

“With over 1 billion posts shared every day, social networks are quickly becoming the primary way people discover and share content on the Web. The result is a huge influx of incoming messages and links people must sort through across multiple web sites just to stay up to date,” said Mike McCue, Flipboard’s CEO. “We believe the timeless principles of print can make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream.”

Designed from the ground up for iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user’s social content. Simply launch Flipboard and “flip” open the cover to get started. From the Table of Contents readers can view their sections and personalize the magazine.

The Facebook and Twitter sections let readers quickly flip through the latest stories, photos and updates from friends and trusted sources. Because Flipboard renders links and images right in the magazine, readers no longer have to scan long lists of posts and click on link after link – instead they instantly see all the stories, comments and images, making it faster and more entertaining to discover, view and share social content.

Flipboard also lets readers easily create sections around topics or people they care about. Choose from Flipboard’s suggested sections on topics such as sports, news, tech and style, with content hand-curated from popular and interesting Twitter feeds. Or, create an entirely new section by searching by topic, person or Twitter lists to make Flipboard even more personal.

The Flipboard App is available for free at www.flipboard.com or from the App Store on iPad or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

ACQUISITION OF ELLERDALE
As part of it’s quest to fundamentally improve the social media experience, Flipboard also announced the acquisition of Ellerdale (see press release: “Flipboard Acquires Ellerdale”). Ellerdale’s advanced semantic analysis of large, real-time data streams will enable Flipboard to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks. Flipboard will also retain the world-class engineering team at Ellerdale, including Arthur van Hoff, a leading Silicon Valley technologist who played a major role in the creation of Java. Arthur will become Flipboard’s Chief Technology Officer and spearhead the company’s technology strategy.

INVESTORS
Flipboard is backed by legendary investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures. Other key investors also include Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, The Chernin Group founded by Peter Chernin, Ron Conway, Alfred Lin, Peter Currie, Quincy Smith, and Ashton Kutcher. The company has raised $10.5 million in a Series A venture capital round.

FLIPBOARD ACQUIRES ELLERDALE TO BOOST CONTENT RELEVANCY IN NEW SOCIAL MAGAZINE

Arthur van Hoff Joins Flipboard as Chief Technology Officer

PALO ALTO, Calif.–July 21, 2010–Flipboard today announced it has acquired Ellerdale, the real-time Web intelligence company. The acquisition concurs with the launch of Flipboard, a social magazine designed for Apple’s iPad, which provides a faster and more engaging way to discover, view, and share what matters on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Ellerdale, founded in 2008, has developed a Web Intelligence technology that applies semantic analysis to large, real-time data streams to extract relevant and valuable information. To date, Ellerdale has indexed over 6 billion messages from around the social Web and currently processes nearly 70 million messages per day. This technology and data set will be become the relevancy engine for the next release of Flipboard, enhancing the reader’s experience by always surfacing the most important and personally interesting information from Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

Designed from the ground up for the iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a user’s social content. With Ellerdale’s technology, future versions of Flipboard will be able to extract, categorize and feature highly relevant and hot trending content from across a variety of social networks.

“Ellerdale has developed an impressive solution for understanding the ever-increasing stream of social data coming at us every day,” said Mike McCue, CEO and co-founder of Flipboard. “This technology will add deep relevancy for our readers, enabling us to present social content in a way that is not only more beautiful, but also more meaningful. It’s a great combination.”

Arthur van Hoff, co-founder of Ellerdale, is joining Flipboard as the company’s new chief technology officer. Van Hoff, who played a major role in the development of the Java programming language at Sun Microsystems, and was founder of six high-tech companies, including Marimba, Strangeberry and Zing, will spearhead Flipboard’s technology strategy.

“Combining the two companies creates a situation in which one plus one equals three, bringing together Flipboard’s innovative front-end with Ellerdale’s powerful real-time relevancy engine on the back-end,” said Arthur van Hoff, co-founder of Ellerdale and Flipboard’s new chief technology officer. “Our technology will play a key role in providing readers with the content that matters most to them.”

Mike McCue and Evan Doll founded Flipboard earlier this year and received $10.5M in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures. The founding team members come from Apple, Netflix, Tellme/Microsoft, Aardvark and Adobe. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

An iPhone 4 Review Roundup

John Paczkowski — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 22:09:48 +0000

“This is really hot,” Apple (AAPL) 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, despite some expected complaints about the device’s performance on AT&T’s (T) network. Below, excerpts from a few of them.

In both hardware and software, [the iPhone4] is a major leap over its already-excellent predecessor, the iPhone 3GS.

It has some downsides and limitations–most important, the overwhelmed AT&T network in the U.S., which, in my tests, the new phone handled sometimes better and, unfortunately, sometimes worse than its predecessor….But, overall, Apple has delivered a big, well-designed update that, in my view, keeps it in the lead in the smartphone wars….

The most important downside of the iPhone 4 is that, in the U.S., it’s shackled to AT&T, which not only still operates a network that has trouble connecting and maintaining calls in many cities, but now has abandoned unlimited, flat-rate data plans. Apple needs a second network.

Both Apple and AT&T told me they worked to make the iPhone 4 do a better job with AT&T’s network. For example, the phone itself is surrounded by a prominent stainless-steel trim piece that acts as a large antenna. And Apple said it also tuned the phone to try to grab whatever band on the network was less congested or less affected by interference–to stress the quality of a signal over its raw strength. AT&T said it, too, made some changes to its network with the new iPhone in mind.

But, in my tests, network reception was a mixed bag.

– Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal

[The iPhone 4] is not the first phone with both a front and back camera. It’s not even the first one to make video calls. But the iPhone 4 is the first phone to make good video calls, reliably, with no sign-up or setup, with a single tap. The picture and audio are rock solid, with very little delay, and it works the first time and every time….Now, the iPhone is no longer the undisputed king of app phones. In particular, the technically inclined may find greater flexibility and choice among its Android rivals, like the HTC Incredible and Evo. They’re more complicated, and their app store not as good, but they’re loaded with droolworthy features like turn-by-turn GPS instructions, speech recognition that saves you typing, removable batteries and a choice of cell networks. If what you care about, however, is size and shape, beauty and battery life, polish and pleasure, then the iPhone 4 is calling your name.

– David Pogue, New York Times

The new iPhone 4 I’ve been testing for about a week and a half–along with the major refresh of the mobile operating system software at the core of recent models–demonstrates once again why Apple’s handset is the one to beat, even as it faces fierce competition from phones based on Google’s Android platform, among others….Critics are left with reasons to whine. Apple’s public dissing of Adobe Flash means you’ll still come upon Web video sites that don’t make nice with the iPhone. I had a few dropped calls. The battery still isn’t user-replaceable, and there’s no slot for expanding memory.

– Ed Baig, USA Today

We’re not going to beat around the bush–in our approximation, the iPhone 4 is the best smartphone on the market right now. The combination of gorgeous new hardware, that amazing display, upgraded cameras, and major improvements to the operating system make this an extremely formidable package. Yes, there are still pain points that we want to see Apple fix, and yes, there are some amazing alternatives to the iPhone 4 out there. But when it comes to the total package–fit and finish in both software and hardware, performance, app selection, and all of the little details that make a device like this what it is–we think it’s the cream of the current crop. We won’t argue that a lot of this is a matter of taste–some people will just prefer the way Android or Symbian works to the iPhone, and others will be on the lookout for a hardware keyboard or a particular asset that the iPhone 4 lacks–but in terms of the total picture, it’s tough to deny that Apple has moved one step past the competition with this phone.

– Josh Topolsky, Engadget

The fourth incarnation of Apple’s iPhone is an incrementally improved, familiar device–not a new kind of device, as was the case with the recent introduction of iPad. Yes, the notable features with iPhone 4–both the device and the iOS4, which came out yesterday in advance of the iPhone itself–are mostly tweaks. But what tweaks they are: Apple’s focus on improvement is as much key to the quality of its products as innovation. But there’s one flaw it doesn’t improve: the poor quality of calls placed over AT&T, which remains the iPhone’s only U.S. carrier….AT&T still sucks, and the best engineering out of Cupertino won’t change that.

– Xeni Jardin, BoingBoing

A Voicemail Transcription Scandal in Britain

Marisa Taylor — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:33:05 +0000

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.

The U.K.-based company, which boasts 30 million users across five continents, says that voicemails are translated into text via conversion technology known as “D2,” or “the Brain.” Customers can read the messages and post them on blogs, social networking sites, or send them to their email inboxes.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

D7 Tech Demo: Siri

Oliver J. Chiang — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:00:37 +0000

Many would-be augurs have been trying to pinpoint the moment the artificial intelligence overlord known as Skynet gets it 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 flight out 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.

Demo Highlights

[ See post to watch video ]

Live Blog

Siri CEO Dag Kittlaus comes out. He introduces himself and the product. It’s been many years of work in the making, he says.
Siri is about making interactions between the Web and user much simpler. It is focusing on mobile first. He shows the interface on an iPhone with both a Google screen and Siri screen side by side. Dag types in a flight query to both.
Siri figures out what you mean. Dag asks it a question, compares the results between Siri and Google (GOOG). Walt: Google is terrible! Dag: It gets really interesting when you ask it do a service. Walt: Can’t Bing do this?
It can take actions on your behalf too. For instance, “Il Forniao [Italian restaurant] reservations tonight for 3 at 5pm.” Siri takes your information and pulls up the reservation function for the restaurant.
Siri is sort of a giant mashup of services, Dag says.
It’s “Carol Bartz,” not “Sheryl Bartz,” Dag. Now let’s try asking for a movie. Siri returns the closest location and time for “Angels and Demons.” Siri has an API.
“Get red sox yankees tickets in boston”–this is one for Walt, says Dag. $1,649–the price is wrong? But Siri delivers. Shows a map of the stadium and seats/tickets.
Walt: so Google is constantly stupid, we see that now. But is it only good for certain services? How about ballet? Dag: It learns, we break it out into various areas of expertise. Right now, for instance, it doesn’t do TV listings. Siri has a Q&A function. Dag asks a question to the True Knowledge Web service. Kara: Ask it “How old is Kara?” Siri’s answer: “Dag, it’s not polite to ask about women’s ages.” It’s arguably broken Asimov’s Second Law already. Someone get John Connor, just in case.
Now Dag is demoing on the Apple (AAPL) iPhone, speaking into the phone. Voice recognition is pretty good. He tells it: “Find a plumber near my house.” Siri pulls up a list of nearby plumbers. Kara: Do you have to have a voice like yours for it to work? Dag: It gets pretty good, it learns. Kara: I like.
Walt: Will it be in the App Store? Dag: This summer, and it will be a free app. Walt: Revenue stream? Dag: Tie-ins with the other platforms, i.e., OpenTable. We’ll start with mobile and then build it out.
Walt and Kara: Thanks; that was really cool.

D7 Tech Demo: Fullpower

John Paczkowski — Wed, 27 May 2009 16:05:51 +0000

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 (BORL), 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 (MCD) 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 (MOT). He followed that up with LightSurf Technologies, a picture-messaging company acquired by Verisign (VRSN) in 2005. Today Philippe Kahn is at D7 as CEO of Fullpower, a company developing accelerometer-based hardware and software.

Session Highlights

[ See post to watch video ]

Live Blog

Walt and Kara welcome Kahn to the stage.
Fullpower, says Kahn, has developed the MotionX Recognition Engine, a technology intended to do for motion and gesture what speech recognition did for speech. “We’ve created a system that studies how you move, as opposed to reacting to it.”
The first demo involves a headset with onboard motion sensing, the MotionX-Headset. “Basically what we’ve done is build a motion-sensing headset,” says Kahn. The headset will differentiate between the sources of motion of its user–if the user is walking or running for example.
Kahn calls a colleague wearing the headset onstage. The colleague demonstrates how calls can be answered by tapping the headset, without using any buttons. Then the colleague begins walking and running around the stage — the technology is able to differentiate between actual user taps and all the other motion.
The device also notices whether its user is walking or running, using the MotionX Recognition Engine and accelerometer to obtain an accurate measurement of distance and speed traveled. The headset tracks the user’s speed and distance, and the user can tap it for spoken updates about his or her progress. The headset automatically turns off when set down, thus saving power, and turns back on when the user picks it up again. Kahn: The same technology used in the headset can be embedded in phones and other devices.
Moving on to the next demo, MotionX-Imaging, the technology demonstrated was full image stabilization using the MotionX Recognition engine and an accelerometer. These were built in to the smartphone. In order to demonstrate this for presentations, every time a picture is taken, the MotionX image stabilization is either applied (“stabilized”) or not applied (“unstabilized”) at random. The pictures are then sorted so you can compare all the regular pictures with the stabilized ones and see the benefit of the technology.

Video Players Compatible With iTunes

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 00:01:00 +0000

There’s no other major item most of us own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as our personal computers. Everybody has questions about them, and we aim to help.

Here are a few questions about computers I’ve received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability. This week my mailbox contained questions about speech-recognition software for Macs, whether Windows Media Player will play video files from iTunes, and if Vista is worth the wait.

If you have a question, send it to me at mossberg@wsj.com, and I may select it to be answered here in Mossberg’s Mailbox.

I have an iPod which uses iTunes software on my Windows computer. With the iTunes software comes QuickTime. I do not want QuickTime to play video files. I wish to use Windows Media Player as the default player. Must I use QuickTime as a video player in order to use iTunes for music?

No. QuickTime is an Apple program that is required by iTunes, even on Windows computers. It can also be used on its own to play some video and audio files. But, if you set its preferences so it isn’t the default player for various types of video files, and you set Windows Media Player as the default, you should be able to use the latter, as in the past. There is one exception: If you purchase videos from Apple’s iTunes Music Store, you can only play them in either iTunes or QuickTime, not Windows Media Player.

Before we buy our daughter a laptop for school, should we wait until the new Microsoft operating system is released next year? If not, should we buy a laptop with a more powerful chip with the intention of upgrading once it is available?

It depends on when she needs the computer. If she can wait until January, when the new Windows Vista will be available preloaded on laptops, then wait. Vista should have significant advantages over Windows XP in the areas of security and user interface.

However, if she needs it now, you may be able to get a laptop that can be upgraded later to Vista. The trick is that Microsoft hasn’t yet published the specs for a laptop that can be upgraded to Vista. My best advice would be to buy the most powerful processor you can afford, a full gigabyte of memory, and a video system that is called “discrete,” rather than “integrated,” with as much dedicated video memory as possible.

I’ve been using the Dragon Naturally Speaking speech-recognition software on my Windows PC at work. Is there a comparable product for the Mac I use at home?

Yes. There are at least two speech-recognition programs for the Mac. One is IBM’s Via Voice (www.nuance.com/viavoice/osx/) and the other is called Mac Speech (www.macspeech.com/). I haven’t tested them, so I can’t say how they compare with Dragon on Windows, or which is best.