In June 2009, I blogged this post noting that Sensory Inc. had packaged “word spotting” capabilities into its firmware in order to support “truly hands free” speech recognition into a wide range of mobile, in car and, ultimately, ubiquitous appliances. A month later Mozer and I discussed the prospects for a broad variety of “Speech Controlled Internet Devices” (SCIDs) to proliferate as people discover the value of a hands-free way to activate, instruct or create content for a the growing number of “black boxes”, “gray boxes” or everyday appliances that are connected to the Internet (and related cloud-based applications, media or content).

Todd demonstrates the SCIDs concept in this video:

Note that the embedded title for this YouTube video is “Truly Hands Free Trigger.wmv”. That’s because Sensory is now shipping Speech Trigger SDKs (software development kits) for mobile devices running either Apple’s iOS4 or the Android operating system. Vlingo, for one, has taken full advantage of the SDK and introduced a hands-free services called Vlingo InCar. As illustrated in the video below, the “trigger” occurs when a driver says “Hey Vlingo”. Then, in response to the prompt “What’s shakin’?” drivers can here the contents of a text message, reply, originate other messages and search for a local business to get spoken directions.

The service is optimized for the Android 2.2 operating system (“Foyo”) and uses Bluetooth for connectivity. Users of the existing Vlingo app, can also originate tweets, update status on Facebook, open and control 3rd party applications and the other activities that Vlingo supports. After a two week “beta” when the service was available only to Spring subscribers, Vlingo expanded to “all Android users” on October 19.

For those of you keeping track at home, the announcement of Vlingo InCar and the release of the “Trigger SDK” was almost simultaneous with the launch of StartTalking from
a Boston-based technology venture called AdelaVoice. As you can see in the video below, AdelaVoice laid claim to being the first and only mobile application that provides a hands-free, eyes-on-the-road way to send and receive text messages. It is a well-understood problem and one that is attracting significant investment dollars, as carriers and application providers work to support safe spoken input of text.

StartTalking Overview

Todd Mozer tells me that the same firmware that supports “trigger words” is being used in high-end, Bluetooth based earpieces from Plantronics to support a hands-free “answer or ignore” function for treating incoming calls. The phone can grab Caller ID information, render it as speech and then prompt the driver to react with “You can say ‘answer’ or ‘ignore’.” It’s brilliantly simple, and much safer than looking around and reaching down to find the phone. In both cases, the objective of the firmware is to provide the most pleasant and efficient user experience possible.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Speech recognition, Mobile Speech Apps, Android, iPhone, Bluetooth, Safe Texting