Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Next-Gen Intel Ultrabooks to Get Voice, Gesture Recognition

The next-generation ultra books will aim to have similar capabilities as  your smartphone does. Speech recognition will be a big part of this…

Source PCMag
Kirk Skaugen Intel

A “massive, massive amount of innovation is coming” in the next generation of thin-and-light ultrabooks, Intel executive Kirk Skaugen said at the Intel Developer Conference here on Tuesday.

The chip giant is preparing its fourth-generation Core chips, code-named Haswell, for a new rush of ultrabooks in 2013 that will feature smartphone-like voice recognition, touch, finger tracking, augmented reality, and gesture-based interfaces courtesy of clip-on sensors that will eventually be integrated into laptops, and more.

Intel has teamed up with some key partners to begin rolling out some of those interface capabilities. Later this year, it will release an introductory software developer package it’s calling Intel Perceptual Computing SDK Beta.

Early developments on this front include a voice-recognition tool by Nuance called Dragon Assistant that will start appearing in Dell ultrabooks later this year. Skaugen also showed off a Kinect-like ultrabook accessory built by SoftKinetics and Creative that combines an infrared close-range gesture tracking camera and dual-microphonethat unit will start shipping in 2013 and be priced at $149, he said.

Some of the new interface technologies, like voice recognition, will start appearing in ultrabooks built around Intel’s current-generation Ivy Bridge-based chips, said Skaugen, an Intel corporate vice president and general manager of its PC Client Group. But Haswell will be the first processor architecture that Intel built from the start with ultrabooks in mind, he added. That will open the door to what Skaugen promised would be “the most innovation over the next 20 months” from Intel than at any other point in the company’s storied history.

Intel kicked off its ultrabook initiative at last year’s IDF, ramped it up at the beginning of this year at CES, and rolled out the first Ivy Bridge-based ultrabooks in the spring. Inarguably inspired by the success of Apple’s MacBook Air line of laptops, Intel’s ultrabook initiative was a not-so-subtle nudge to its OEM partners to start making thin-and-light, fast-booting, visually attractive laptops for under $1,000.

Now Intel aims to take the ultrabook on the next stage of a journey that looks to blur the design and usage lines between traditional laptops and consumer tablets, a category that the chip giant has famously found it tough to penetrate.

Skaugen said there are about 70 ultrabooks on the market at the moment. Next year, Intel is banking on doubling that number. With next month’s release of Microsoft’s new Windows 8 operating system, 40 upcoming ultrabooks will be touch-enabled, he said. Going forward, makers of ultrabooks will start to integrate sensors and technologies commonly found in smartphones and tablets, like gyroscopes, accelerometers, GPS, NFC, and 3G and 4G-LTE connectivity, he added.

The next wave of ultrabooks will include tablet-morphing form factors that Intel is broadly breaking down into two categories, convertible and detachable. Upcoming convertibles Skaugen showed at IDF feature mechanics that allow users to swivel and flip a clamshell into a tablet, slide screens into position to do the same, or simply fold back a display onto the base to form a slate. Detachables, well, the name is self-explanatorythese units have displays that serve as laptop screens when they’re attached to a keyboard and as tablets when you pop them off the base.

Incidentally, Intel is pushing for the same sort of mechanical adaptability to be applied to all-in-one desktops. Skaugen demoed a new touch-enabled all-in-one from Sony called the Vaio Tap 20, which can be easily maneuvered into an angled easel position or even made to lay flat on a tabletop, turning it into a Surface-like family slate. Future all-in-ones could come with battery packs and be completely detachable from their stands, he said.

Haswell is the key to a lot of this stuff happening, according to Intel. The next-gen Core processors will feature the same 22-nanometer process as Ivy Bridge, but they’ve been designed to better integrate ultrabook-driven technologies like deep security and fast boot times, as well as for the host of new interface capabilities Intel is planning.

The chip giant has also managed to bring the thermals down for its next-gen laptop chips by a considerable amount, mainly by taking advantage of 22nm process technology and baking in more advanced power management for extending battery life, Skaugen said.

The upshot is that Intel’s main lineup of Haswell chips for ultrabooks will draw 15 watts, down from the Ivy Bridge generation’s 17 wattsitself a big improvement on the 35-watt chips Intel had previously offered for laptops prior to its ultrabook initiative.

But there’s more. Haswell will also include a class of processors that draw just 10 wattsthose will target the ultrabook convertible/detachable form factors, Skaugen said.

via http://www.speechtechnologygroup.com/speech-blog - The next-generation ultra books will aim to have similar capabilities as  your smartphone does. Speech recognition will be a big part of this… Source  PCMag A “massive, massive amount of innovation is coming” in the next generation of thin-and-light ultrabooks, Intel executive Kirk Skaugen said at t ...

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Bulletproof Money Will Be a Thief’s Worst Nightmare – and Help Drive the Mobile Wave - Money Morning

Voice biometrics also known as voice recognition is about to get  big boost…

Source: google.com 

Imagine checking in at the airport, buying a cup of coffee at a local café, even paying for your clothes or groceries at the store’s register… all with a quick wireless scan of your smartphone.

It’s all possible today, thanks to a new type of tech called Near Field Communications (NFC). No coins to fumble with. No waiting while the store’s machine dials up your bank. No receipts to sign and then stuff into your pocket. The spread of NFC technology is a win-win for the customer and the merchant alike.

With NFC, your phone becomes your wallet. It’s able to “talk” to any vendor, bank, brokerage, or credit card firm you like. This technology is set to take the world by storm. In as little as a decade, billions of people around the world will convert to digital currency as their means of paying for the things they need every day.

There’s just one thing slowing it all down right now - mobile security. Using mobile phones as de facto wallets alarms some people. They fear that if your phone gets stolen, thieves could gain access to every bank, brokerage, or store account you have. But that’s about to change…

Making Digital Money Bulletproof

Indeed, much to the chagrin of thieves and con artists, mobile security will hasten the advent of bulletproof digital money used around the world.

I had the chance to talk about this with Michael Saylor, author of the best-selling new book “Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything.” Saylor, who also serves as CEO of MicroStrategy Inc. (NASDAQgs:MSTR), told me alarmists are missing the big picture:

“I think the most important thing to be said about mobile security, and maybe mobile identity, is there are one million organizations in the world that have obsolete, ineffective identification systems now. Most of these things - passports, credit cards, driver’s license, even things we think are reasonably secure, aren’t. And many things aren’t secure at all.

“I think that it’s now possible to create a mobile identity system that runs on a smartphone which is anywhere from 100 times to 10,000 times as secure. Not only are they more secure, it’s impossible to counterfeit and impossible to forge.”
In fact, there are three key security features Saylor believes will make mobile commerce the standard of safe business transactions in just a few years.

Mobile Security Feature No. 1: Fingerprint Scanning

Fingerprint tech is a standard security feature around the world. It works because no two people - not even identical twins - have the same fingerprints. Believe it or not, fingerprinting is actually pretty old. It began in eighth-century Japan. But this ancient approach to security is about to get a big upgrade. Since many smartphones have touch-sensitive screens, by definition, they work with your fingertips. All we need to do is convert that screen into a scanner that takes the place of a password. That way, it only works for you. If you lose your phone or someone steals it, the device goes dead.

That’s probably why Apple Inc. (Nasdaq:AAPL) just spent $356 million to buy AuthenTec, a mobile network security firm. The journal ZDNet says AuthenTec’s sensors are state of the art in touch-based security. “These fingerprint swipe sensors use a patented sub-surface technology to read the live layer of skin beneath the skin’s surface where the fingerprint is first formed,” according to the author of the ZDNet article. This makes them “much harder to fool than traditional fingerprint sensors.” Many tech experts believe this acquisition signals that Apple will soon employ fingerprint scans in both the iPhone and the iPad.

Mobile Security Feature No. 2: Eye Scans

The public already has a good sense of how this works. We saw it featured in the popular James Bond film “GoldenEye” from 1995 and the first “Mission: Impossible” that came out a year later, as well as 2002’s “Minority Report.” In that film, Tom Cruise’s character John Anderton undergoes a back-alley eye transplant operation to evade the ever present eye scanners of the authorities. Right now we have two main ways to scan the eyes.

The first is to focus on the retina, the round tissue in the back of your eye that contains a “screen” of cells that respond to light. That annoying “red eye” effect you see in bad photos is actually the camera capturing the retina when the bright flash goes off too fast for the pupil to close. Saylor notes that the retina serves to “pre-process images,” adding that scientists actually consider it a part of the brain. Scanning the retina works to establish identity because it has a pattern of blood vessels unique to each person. The second way we have of establishing identity via the eye is the iris - the colored ring around the pupil. It’s a jumble of patterns. See, no two are alike. Even the iris in your left eye differs from the one in your right. “The New York Police Department uses iris scans when booking suspects,” said Saylor. “The city of Leon, Mexico, deploys iris scanners in crowded public spaces, where they can identify up to 50 people at once.”

Mobile Security Feature No. 3: Voice Recognition

Most investors already know about voice recognition. They’ve seen it for decades in TV shows like the original “Star Trek” and in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

In 2012, speech recognition tech has quickly been gaining ground. Apple uses it as a digital voice assistant named Siri that’s in the most recent version of the iPhone. So millions of people already have a sense that voice tech is the wave of the future.

But Saylor rightly draws a sharp contrast between speech and voice recognition. The latter is based on the fact that each person’s voice is distinct. “Voice recognition doesn’t try to figure out what you say,” Saylor explained, “it tries to determine if the voice is actually yours. The software to identify your voice exists and would be an easy addition to the array of identity techniques available to mobile devices.” As I see it, these features and others that might appear later can greatly increase both business and personal security. And there’s no reason why you can’t blend several of them together - say, an eye scan with voice recognition - to provide deeper safeguards. In the future, you’ll have all sorts of biometric security features that will protect your assets and your identity. All of them can both protect corporate assets and empower the individual. Finally, these same features could also exist inside your PC or even in different rooms within your home to give you a total security package. We’re not far from the day when ordinary folks will be able to defeat even the smartest hacker around, just by touching or looking into their phone’s screen. And it’s all because the world is going mobile.

via http://www.speechtechnologygroup.com/speech-blog - Voice biometrics also known as voice recognition is about to get  big boost… Source:  google.com  Imagine checking in at the airport, buying a cup of coffee at a local café, even paying for your clothes or groceries at the store’s register… all with a quick wireless scan of your smartphone. It’s all ...

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

The Upside for Speech Recognition in Mobile Devices

Network speech recognition will be the next big wave…
Source: google.com

Get used to the idea of talking to all your consumer electronics (CE) devices as a primary means of interaction -- for this is the future of human interface design, particularly with mobile communication devices.

As mobile speech recognition technologies continue to improve in their efficacy, the vendors of the speech technology platforms are making concerted efforts to enable the long tail of mobile application developers with speech recognition capabilities.

According to the latest market study by ABI Research, the efforts of companies such as Nuance, AT&T, and iSpeech should be noted for exposing their APIs and developer programs as the foremost strategy in reaching the long tail of mobile device applications.

  "Reaching a varied group of developers working on different operating system (OS) and hardware platforms makes cloud based solutions the optimum approach to enabling the masses," says Michael Morgan, senior analyst at ABI Research.

It is the approach of using network based solutions that will drive the rapid increase in cloud based service revenues.
Historically, mobile speech recognition was delivered to consumers through relationships between device OEMs and platform vendors. The other route to the consumer came through virtual assistant applications that were often developed by the platform vendors.
Smaller application development efforts lacked the resources and expertise to bring the benefit of speech recognition to their products. This dynamic has kept speech recognition trapped in functionally specific applications.
Leveraging the cloud as a delivery mechanism, platform vendors can enable nearly any application developer that wishes to make its user interface experience more efficient.
ABI Research expects that consumers will first see the benefits of these efforts in mobile banking and retail applications. Their new "Speech Recognition in Mobile Devices" report provides further details on the market for speech recognition in mobile devices in addition to a discussion on leading players in this market. 

via http://www.speechtechnologygroup.com/speech-blog - Network speech recognition will be the next big wave… Source:  google.com Get used to the idea of talking to all your consumer electronics (CE) devices as a primary means of interaction -- for this is the future of human interface design, particularly with mobile communication devices. As mobile spe ...

1.1 billion phones with rich voice control by 2016

After many years of going through the different phases in the technology adoption cycle, speech recognition has finally gone mainstream…

Source: google.com

There will be 1.1 billion phones shipped in 2016 featuring the ability to command and control the phone through a voice user interface, according to analyst ARCchart.

ARCchart said that advances in mobile computing power and the imaginative usage of artificial intelligence are now making true voice control on handheld devices a reality.  Apple’s Siri, currently the most successful Rich voice solution on the market, has woven an “attractive tapestry of search, intuitive answer and navigation functions”, and ARCchart believes that this has ignited a voice command “arms race” in the smartphone market.

That arms race will drive sales of over a billion Rich Voice phones by 2016, the analyst said.

What is rich voice?
Basic voice control functions, which include simple voice tags, have now evolved into Rich voice, which leverages intuitive and artificial intelligence features. Intuitive assistance is a key aspect of Rich voice control and ARCchart sees the capability as the latest killer application in smartphones.  It combines the power of artificial intelligence with voice search, allowing queries to be posed without adhering to a rigid syntax.

The strategic importance of voice recognition and control will lead to major internalisation of voice recognition platforms. Google, for example, develops its own voice recognition engine. Microsoft acquired TellMe in 2007 and based its voice command feature on this platform. ARCchart also concluded that there are strong indications that Apple will assert greater control over the speech recognition engine in future versions of Siri.  

via http://www.speechtechnologygroup.com/speech-blog - After many years of going through the different phases in the technology adoption cycle, speech recognition has finally gone mainstream… Source:  google.com There will be 1.1 billion phones shipped in 2016 featuring the ability to command and control the phone through a voice user interface, accordi ...

Who will keep the remote control for online video?

Speech recognition systems for the living room and Google +…

Source: google.com

Video in all its guises, we’re constantly being told, is the wave of the future and a potential clogger of networks. With Apple’s FaceTime and Skype apparently being embedded on the upcoming Windows Phone 8 smartphones, Google has also moved by pushing video for businesses via Google+. By I.D. Scales.

The still relatively nascent online video calling and conferencing market looks like it’s gearing up.  (see - “Can I help or are you just browsing?” Real Time Communications is on its way)  Apple (with FaceTime), Microsoft (with Skype) and the telcos slowly bringing forward their RCS (Rich Communication Services) offerings, along with a host of specialist subscription videoconferencing players, are all in the mix. Now Google has embarked on a sort of flanking move by announcing Google+ video for business users via the Google+ hangouts feature. 
 
There’s no real technical barrier to actually running person-to-person or group video streams across the Internet - the big issue for TelecomTV readers is what sort of company will steer the process by enabling the connections; what business models will they deploy and whose business models will they disrupt?
 
Google, true to form, is intent on offering free and easy-to-use video to bolster its Google + platform.
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This is all about Google cementing its Google + social networking ‘glue’ across and between its growing set of online services for both business and individual use.  
 
The strategy is to make the Google platform ‘whole’ considerably greater than the sum of its parts by including all sorts of services, including communications services, as natural functions or features.
 
Google says the video function will be available to Google’s business users via the ‘hangouts’ part of Google+. The business offer gives business apps users (or rather their IT departments) necessary control over content via administrative controls, so that content can be shared between employees without security worries, or selectively shared with some people outside the company as well. 
 
Google is making these new features, including the video, free to through to the end 2013 as, it claims, it adds more and more features and controls. The idea is to get as many businesses using it as possible before Google slaps some sort of price-tag on it. 
 
Hangouts lets up to 10 people video chat at a time so, with the admin controls and businessy surround, it appears to offer a hefty challenge to Microsoft’s Skype at the more professional end of the market and an equally hefty challenge to telcos as they attempt to roll out their own video services to compete.
via http://www.speechtechnologygroup.com/speech-blog - Speech recognition systems for the living room and Google +… Source:  google.com Video in all its guises, we’re constantly being told, is the wave of the future and a potential clogger of networks. With Apple’s FaceTime and Skype apparently being embedded on the upcoming Windows Phone 8 smartphones, ...

Securing Your Voice - voice biometrics on the rise

Voice biometrics and voice verification technology is getting more attention in the industry…


Researchers turn voiceprints into passwords to avoid storing your actual speech anywhere.
Voice authentication is increasingly used by tens of millions of people, including bank and telecom customers: you record a sample upon enrollment, and then speak that passage each time you call in, confirming your identity with a certainty regular passwords can’t match. But if hackers obtain your voiceprint?under scenarios akin to breaches of credit-card and other personal data?they could use it to break into other systems that use voice authentication.

Now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University say they’ve developed voice-verification technology that can transform your voice into a series of password-like data strings, in a process that can be handled on the average smart phone. Your actual voice never leaves your phone, during enrollment or later authentication.

“We are the first to convert a voice recording to something like passwords,” says Bhiksha Raj, the CMU computer scientist who led the research. “With fingerprints, this is exactly what is done, but nobody has figured out how to do it with voice until now.” The work will be presented as a keynote speech at an information security conference in Passau, Germany next month.

The technology handles the slight differences in the way people speak from day to day by making multiple password-like data strings using different mathematical functions. By comparing how many of those match, it can determine whether the speaker is the person who enrolled. “The key to making it work is that instead of converting it to just one password, we convert it to a large collection of them,” Raj says.

The technology also throws in a dash of extra data specific to your phone, so that “nobody else besides you, using your smart phone, can generate the specific strings that you did,” he says. Then it encrypts those data strings for their journey across the network.

The CMU system is accurate 95 percent of the time using a test dataset. (Errors would simply require a speaker to repeat the authentication process.) That’s not quite as good as commercial systems that use stored voiceprints, but the technology is still being honed, and improvements are expected, says Raj. He adds that the method, though still in the research phase, is computationally efficient enough to work on most smart phones.

Other research efforts to protect voice privacy in voice verification have tried to work with encrypted versions of voice files?without ever decrypting them. (See “Homomorphic Encryption.”) But that method takes so much computational horsepower that it’s “currently impractical,” says Shantanu Rane, principal research scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Raj’s technology “works fast while giving reasonable verification accuracy,” Rane adds.

Other groups are working on different methods to protect voice privacy. For the speech recognition used by Apple‘s Siri app, researchers at BBN, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, have proposed only sending certain features of your voice to Apple (see “Wiping Away Your Siri Fingerprint”), rather than the voice itself.

It might take only take one bad voice-data breach to shock users and shake the industry, says Prem Natarajan, executive vice president at Raytheon BBN Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Privacy-preserving speech processing, including for voice verification, is likely to be of increasing importance” given the surging popularity of voice interfaces, he says (see “Where Speech Recognition is Going”). “I would like nothing more than to be able to carry only one password with me?my voice.”

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via http://www.speechtechnologygroup.com/speech-blog - Voice biometrics and voice verification technology is getting more attention in the industry… Researchers turn voiceprints into passwords to avoid storing your actual speech anywhere. Voice authentication is increasingly used by tens of millions of people, including bank and telecom customers: you r ...

Text-to-Speech and WebKit Now on One Laptop per Child Devices - Softpedia

The One Laptop Per child initiative ads a new browser with text to speech capabilities…

Source: google.com
OLPC product family gets updated OSEnlarge picture - OLPC product family gets updated OS
It wasn’t too long ago that we reported on OLPC’s next project, but now we have something to say about those that are already out there. Long story short, the operating system running on them has received a major update. But first, some context: Mozilla, maker of the Firefox OS and the Thunderbird e-mail application, decided, last year, to stop support for embedding the Gecko browser engine in third party applications. OLPC used to rely on Gecko, but has now decided to switch to WebKit, a “far superior alternative” that delivers “faster activity startup time and a smoother browsing experience.” In addition to this, the 12.1.0 release adds a text-to-speech function, support for USB DisplayLink adapters, and a refreshed offline Wikipedia library (in English and Spanish).
via http://www.speechtechnologygroup.com/speech-blog - The One Laptop Per child initiative ads a new browser with text to speech capabilities… Source:  google.com - OLPC product family gets updated OS It wasn’t too long ago that we reported on OLPC’s next project , but now we have something to say about those that are already out there. Long story short ...