Google may have acquired Geoffrey Hinton’s DNNresearch and is now using his technologies to power its Google+ photo search features, but the academic work Hinton did on deep neural networks (DNN) is now also helping Microsoft to improve its speech recognition systems. Microsoft today announced that it is using DNNs to double the speed of its speech recognition engine for Windows Phone while… → Read More
Duolingo, the popular language-learning service founded by CAPTCHA co-inventor and reCAPTCHA founder Luis von Ahn, just launched the latest version of its mobile app for the iPhone. This new version introduces an offline mode, so users can now do their lessons on the subway and on planes, as well as a voice-recognition feature that tells learners whether they pronounced a word or sentence… → Read More
Last month, famed inventor, entrepreneur and futurist, Ray Kurwzeil, announced that he was joining Google as a director of engineering. Many have wondered what Kurzweil’s new position would mean for Google and the billions of people its global reach directly or indirectly touches. Would they be uploading Kurzweil’s brain into their datacenters? Become the next Skynet?
Speaking at an event at… → Read More
Android users finally have a way to show up their iPhone-toting, Siri-using counterparts. With Sonalight Text by Voice, a new Y Combinator-backed startup, you can perform entirely hands-free texting. And by hands-free, I mean you don’t have to push a button, tap the screen, or perform any other actions that would require you to take your hands off the wheel. Yes, that’s right – Sonalight is… → Read More
NEC today announced [JP] they developed automatic software for mobile phones automatically translates travel-related words and phrases from Japanese to English and English to Japanese and that seems to be more advanced than this solution. → Read More
Tokyo-based BBSS, a 100% subsidiary of Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank, has created an app for the iPhone that translates spoken Japanese into either English or Chinese [JP]. → Read More
From August 8th, Sega Toys Japan will start selling a robot dog [JP, PDF] specifically designed for children between 4-8 years old. The “Uchi no Suupa Doggu Sakadachi Rakki” (My Super Stand-up-and-beg Dog Lucky) can respond to a total of 13 spoken phrases. Sega Toys said the dog was developed with the voices of around 100 children who helped to improve the speech recognition… → Read More
[photopress:keyboard.jpg,full,center] Bill Gates was recently giving a speech at Canegie Mellon and said the following: “We say that there’ll be more searches done through speech than through the keyboard five years from now.” That’s five years from now. 2013. We’ll have jet packs and flying cars and push-button girlfriends by then, too. At least I will. Bill, as your… → Read More
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