Remote speech recognition, with Instinct!

 

 Samsung's "Instinct" mobile device, scheduled to become available June 20th, now includes some rather advanced speech recognition coupled with nice artificial intelligence features. Slated to be a viable i-Phone competitor, this feature certainly helps that "battle", IOHO.

 

 Via Gizmodo's very nice article:
"Samsung's Instinct may be the best stab at the coveted title of iPhone killah this CTIA. The 3.1-inch touchscreen phone has localized haptic feedback, plus three hard navigation keys.

 Check out the well-done You Tube video:



 Let's hope the Instinct turns out to be all it's promised.. This advanced speech recognition should really begin to galvanize widespread recognition of true remote speech recognition, from newly arriving moble devices!

 

Jott enables dictated email replies, on Blackberry

 

 Jott (we've blogged about them before) has rolled out speech recognition to several Blackberry models, the 8800, 8300 and 8100 - that allows users to reply to emails by speech alone. It's a free beta download for now, and offers options for “Reply with Jott” and “Reply All with Jott.”

 

 Jott also supplies users with a copy of the transcribed email, which can be pretty helpful in tweaking recognition accuracy and spotting/preventing (inevitable) transcription nuances.

  The Jott web page can be viewed here.

 

Speech-driven "Anywhere-anytime" data entry..

 

 A research team with the Canadian National Research Council's Institute for Information Technology (NRC-IIT) is working on a way to enter data using speech; they've created a multimodal field data entry (MFDE) application to help with data collection during concrete inspections. The researchers say that if workers are are using instruments or taking measurements they can use speech to enter data or information at the same time.


 While background noise was somewhat of a problem the researchers have gone back to the drawing board to identify a better microphone for the application. Even with the noise issue respondents claimed they were able to complete tasks faster while at the same time being able to be more aware of their environment.

 They've worked on actual mobile microphone improvements; Their research won "Best Paper" at the prestigious British Human-Computer Interaction conference, HCI 2007 about microphone performance in noisy ambience.

 They are also seeking the best speech engine for noisy environments:
Per NRC IIT:
"We also plan to look at different speech recognition engines to see if we can improve the accuracy at higher noise levels."

 

Newest throat-mounted microphone ??

 

 Pro Idee, a UK website for the Denmark online retailer Pro-Idee GmbH & Co. KG is offering a pretty innovative microphone [click image for larger view in new window]:



 Pro-Idee's specs. include the microphone offering nine hours of talk-time, 10db of noise suppression and complete Bluetooth feature functionality,
 (Click here to read the CNET review).

~ We'd love to hear from anyone that's tried this hardware..

 

Goog411 speech recognition to GE phones

 

 The GE Premiere DECT 6.0 28821FJ3 has a cool new "GOOG-411" button centered on the handset, that get's instant free business information calls!

 The button auto-dials Google’s free, voice-activated, speech recognition-driven business directory assistance service and becomes a feature on more than a dozen GE phones to be available in April 2008.

 Connections are done for free, leaving your dial tone provider out of luck ;-) when it comes to directory assistance call revenues.

 (This deal benefits Google in one particularly semi-interesting area, as it provides a "no brainer" option for even more users to give Google more phoneme samples it might not otherwise have gleaned, of independent spoken audio samples in it's quest for advanced speaker-independent speech recognition, as well)

 

Navigation, solely w/ remote speech recognition!

 

NavStar Technologies, in partnership with Navteq, a provider of digital maps for vehicle navigation, has released "Voice Navigator" - an entirely speech recognition driven navigation device accessing only a remote server!

True, wireless remote speech recognition... via NavStar:
"No PC's, CD's, DVD's, tiny screens, difficult interfaces, or piles of 'stuff' to learn. Simply plug it in and start using it."

According to NavStar, there is even "planning intelligence" built in:
Users can plan their trip ahead of time, store it and then access the planned route with the push of a button.

The device interfaces with user's mobile devices, using their wireless broadband service. Navteq's "Points of Interest" database includes over six million listings including airports, restaurants, hotels, banks, gas stations and other popular destinations, or, subscribers can state the exact address desired.

Our techie hats are off to this wonderful advance in true wireless remote speech recognition!

 

Wireless, remote speech recognition driven spybots!

 

 Robert at RoboDance, has created a video of some incredible wireless, remote speech recognition functions he's added into a WowWee Roboquad Robot. It is quite easily used as a "Spybot" for remote surveillance; and can be controlled remotely, across the Internet using speech recognition from anywhere! It's called RoboDance 4.

 Using Skype's video call service, and an infrared link from the host PC to the robot, Robert shows how he makes this robot do some amazing things..

 We could tell you more, but the video below has to be seen to be believed.
(** What's particularly impressive is during the video, Rob's robot listens only to it's commands, even though they're mixed with his video's continuous speech narrative!)

 The details of the necessary hardware & software are available Here,
and Robert says the Robodance 4 is available now; joining his mailing list here gets notifications of how to purchase this pretty darn cool robot!

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