Voice recognition is not a new idea, but enabling machines to determine a person’s mood using their raw voice is.

Beyond Verbal Communications, an Israel-based startup that’s just pulled in a $2.8 million seed round of funding, uses what it calls Emotions Analytics to determine someone’s emotions and character traits in real-time as they speak. Emotions Analytics is a new field based on human vocal intonations and enables machines to understand the person’s personality and moods. According to Beyond Verbal, Emotions Analytics will transform the way people interact with machines and with each other.

“Nearly two decades of research tells us that it’s not what someone says, but how they say it, that tells the full story,” Yuval Mor, CEO of Beyond Verbal, said in a statement. “Beyond Verbal has the potential to impact numerous multibillion dollar verticals and leverage a new market of emotionally-enhanced applications installed in any voice-enabled, voice-activated, or voice-controlled device.”

The technology is based on 18 years of research by physicists and neuropsychologists. Scientists studied more than 60,000 subjects in 26 languages.

Beyond Verbal licenses its technology for use in consumer applications. The first mobile application using its API will launch in the near future, and Beyond Verbal is building a web tool that allows people to use the platform to analyze voices.

The company launched in May 2013. The funding was led by angel investor Kenges Rakishev, and new VC Genesis Angels.

Photo Credit: Beyond Verbal Communications

It’s hardly a ringing endorsement for the most exciting new Google product in perhaps … ever.

Of course, he is 57 years old, was born in the 1950s, and was the CEO of a boring enterprise software company, Novell, before joining the much more au courant Google.

But it’s not just that he’s an old fuddy-duddy. He’s right.

A Google Glass future in which we all have smart devices perched on our noses, in which we’re all viewing digital streams of content while simultaneously navigating the physical world, then touching our eyewear and speaking to it, is very, very odd.

An alternative, of course, is gesture control, and Leap Motion, which was recently integrated into Google Earth, and has announced its intentions of bringing embedded gesture control not just to PCs but also to “watches, smartphones, and glasses.” But while waving and motioning to your headgear may be less disruptive in social settings — and more realistic in busy, noisy environments — it’s also going to make for fairly odd behavior.

In the future, we’ll all have Tourrette’s syndrome.

That’s something Schmidt is recognizing, saying that there are clearly places where Google Glass would be inappropriate. The locker room, for example, and other places where there’s an expectation of privacy.

But it does mean that our current cultural go-to move in unfamiliar social settings — head down, checking your smartphone — will need some updating for a future in which everyone carries smart video cameras on their heads that are always connected to the Internet.

Another problem with the augmented-reality devices?

“If you like eye contact, I’m sorry, you lost,” Schmidt said.

Sounds like a paradise for geeks. For others, I’m not so sure. Perhaps talking to an iWatch will be less weird. At least, thanks to Dick Tracy, we have some cultural precedent for that.

Photo credit: Jolie O’Dell/Flickr, Chris Chabot/Google

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple and China just can’t seem to get along lately.

Today Apple appeared in court for the first time in the year-long dispute with Shanghai’s Zhizhen Network Technology Co., which says Apple’s Siri personal assistant technology infringes its patented voice recognition software.

Last year Apple added Mandarin and Cantonese support for Siri and was promptly sued by Zhizhen, which produces an app called Xiao i Robot for both iOS and Android. Xiao i Robot uses speech recognition to deliver news, weather, and other updates to users.

“The company will ask Apple to stop manufacturing and selling products using its patent rights, once Apple’s infringement is confirmed,” the company’s lawyer told the AFP. Unsurprisingly, he added that the company doesn’t “exclude the possibility of demanding compensation in the future.”

This is, clearly, a very typical patent shakedown.

But Zhizhen is not a patent troll. It is a real company producing real products, which the company says it has been working on since the early 2000s and patented in 2004. Here’s a comparison, in Chinese, of its iOS app with Siri:

Apple has already settled in previous Chinese trademark cases, most notably with ProView over its ownership of “iPad.” Apple ended up paying that bankrupt company $60 million to make the case go away.

After a clumsy astroturfing campaign against Apple orchestrated by China Central Television last week and a series of attacks by the state’s main propaganda organ, the People’s Daily, this week, Apple looks to be in for a tough time in China.

The case is scheduled to go to trial in July.

As the rise of Siri and its competitors has shown, voice control has become a huge part of how we interact with mobile devices. So you shouldn’t be too surprised that Google is bringing voice control to the desktop as well.

With the latest Chrome beta, Google is giving developers some big new voice-centered tools that will allow them to integrate speech recognition into their web apps.

There are a lot of pretty obvious applications for the functionality, which will eventually allow Chrome users to dictate search queries, documents, and other text inputs. While there’s not much new ground being broken there, it won’t be long until developers figure out other, more interesting uses for the new voice API.

Google has been making a lot of headway with voice search as of late, having introduced its voice-focused Search app for iOS in October. (VentureBeat’s John Koetsier was a big fan of the release.)

To get a better idea of how Chrome’s voice recognition will look, watch the video below.

Intel says it is making progress on its “perceptual computing” initiative to make computers more intuitive to control.

Last year, Intel talked about how it wanted to go beyond touchscreens and equip everyday computers such as desktops and laptops with technologies such as gesture control, face recognition, voice recognition, and eye control. This year, those initiatives have all taken shape, said Kirk Skaugen, the vice president of the PC client group at Intel, in a press event at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today.

Back in September, voice recognition firm Nuance announced it would provide technology for a series of Dell ultrabooks, or thin and light laptops. That fulfilled on promise of perceptual computing.

Intel showed a demo of Valve’s Portal 2 being played with gesture controls, using motion-sensing technology from Sixense. That game shipped last fall, making it possible to play it by waving your hands around in front of a computer.

“Gaming is very interesting, but we can do other things with this technology,” Skaugen said.

For instance, you can hold more interesting video conferences with coworkers. Using a technology from Personify, Intel showed how you can hold a video chat with coworkers and insert their images into the presentation that everyone is sharing. Since each person viewing the presentation can see the expressions of coworkers, they can more easily tell what kind of reaction coworkers are having.

Skaugen also showed that — not only is gesture computing good for computer games — it is also useful for computer security. He said that face-recognition technology using special webcams is coming along. And both face recognition and voice recognition will provide for much better computer security in the future. Skaugen noted that a recent breach of passwords showed that the top password that people use is “123456.” To get around the problem of character-based passwords, Skaugen believes that perceptual computing will provide security that will be hard to defeat.

Leading artificial intelligence experts are investigating ways to commercialize a rapidly emerging sub-field of research known as “deep learning.” This month, a research team under renowned scientist Geoffrey E. Hinton’s tutelage won a prize sponsored by Merck to design software to uncover molecules that are most likely to be good candidates for new drugs.

The win was a particularly impressive feat given that the team entered at the last minute and was working with relatively small data-sets. Click here to read more about “how they did it.”

In a story originally reported by the New York Times, even skeptical scientists admit this is a significant advancement. “The kind of jump we are seeing in the accuracy of these systems is very rare indeed,” NYU computer scientist Yann leCun told the Times.

Silicon Valley’s technology companies have used artificial intelligence technology for several years. Deep learning is yielding new discoveries in fields like speech recognition and computer vision. It is already used in Apple’s Siri virtual personal assistant and Google Street View.

This is just the beginning. Today’s image recognition systems do not use human-familiar concepts like ‘mouth, or ‘eyes’ but statistical properties derived from the image. Deep learning is based on learning several levels of representations, and higher-level concepts are defined from lower-level ones.

“The innovation of deep learning is that it not only arranges these properties into hierarchies, but it works out how many levels of hierarchy best fit the data,” wrote Tom Stafford and Matt Webb, neuroscience researchers from Mind Hacks.

Recently, deep learning systems have been able to outperform humans. A team at the Swiss AI Lab at the University of Lugano won a pattern recognition test to identify images in a database of traffic signs against a human expert.

In the future, science writer John Markoff posits, deep learning will make surveillance technologies cheaper and more accessible, help marketers comb through data to identify consumer buying patterns, and may also pave the way for self-driving cars and robots that can replace human workers.

Machine Image via Shutterstock

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Even though Nuance’s desktop voice recognition software is getting a bit long in the tooth, the company clearly understands the potential for its technology in mobile devices, after powering Apple’s Siri and releasing useful apps of its own.

Today Nuance announced Nina, a collection of personal assistant technologies that will bring Siri-like functionality to customer service mobile apps for the likes of banks and insurance companies. Using a combination of voice biometrics, speech recognition, natural language recognition, and other Nuance tech, Nina will be able to recognize your voice and also step you through customer service options.

Basically, Nina could mean the end of convoluted customer service phone trees. It’s also the natural progression for Nuance’s voice recognition technology, which, in addition to powering Apple’s Siri, runs dictation on Android and other mobile platforms.

Naturally, Nina includes a software development kit for developers to tap into, and it comes with a pre-made virtual assistant persona. Developers can also customize the persona to their apps — allowing for a more intimate customer service experience than a traditional phone tree. Nina is powered by Nuance’s Virtual Assistant Cloud, which handles all of the heavy-duty processing for voice recognition (so it’s not entirely reliant on your device). The company claims that Nina is the first virtual assistant software to combine voice biometrics and voice recognition.

Nuance announced today that the USAA, which provides banking services to the U.S. military, has already signed up to use Nina in its app. The USAA will launch a pilot program featuring Nina in August, and all of its members will have access to the technology in early 2013.

Nuance is targeting Nina at large businesses instead of small indie developers. Businesses can sign up for Nina starting today.

Even though Nuance’s technology is powering the speech recognition revolution across iOS and Android, the company hasn’t forgotten about its bread-and-butter software suite.

Today Nuance announced Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12, the latest entry in the long-running voice-recognition software series, which boasts 20 percent better accuracy than the previous version. Overall, the company says the new release has over 100 new features.

If you’re upgrading from an earlier version of Dragon, the accuracy benefits are even better: The company says the new version of the software is 35 percent more accurate than Dragon 10, 55 percent more accurate that Dragon 9, and 75 percent more accurate then Dragon 8 (which, to be fair, was released way back in 2004).

Unsurprisingly, performance is also dramatically improved. Not only will Dragon perform better on the same hardware as previous versions, it can also adapt to better hardware. If you have a computer with a quad core processor and 4 gigabytes of RAM, Dragon will automatically use the fastest speech model, according to Nuance’s senior manager of corporate communications, Erica Hill.

Having used earlier versions of Dragon in the past (and training plenty of users on it as well), I decided to give the new version a spin for writing much of this post. The setup process is still pretty much the same. The installation takes about 5 to 10 minutes, but you’ll have to spend 15 minutes or so training the dictation. While annoying, the training period is worth it — otherwise Dragon is nowhere near as accurate as it could be.

Based on my first impressions, Dragon 12 is definitely far more accurate than Dragon 10 from the get-go. After my initial training, Dragon rarely stumbled with complex words or expressions. Indeed, dictation feels more natural this time around (it helps that Nuance bundles a decent Plantronics headset in the box) — though editing text using your voice still remains a chore. You’ll still need to do a final editing pass on most text with a keyboard, but that will obviously be less necessary as you use Dragon and get used to its quirks.

While Dragon previously adapted to your speech mannerisms over time, the software is even smarter now thanks to a new feature called Smart Format Rules. Dragon 12 will keep track of your word, phrase, and format corrections, which should ultimately make its dictations indistinguishable from your own writing style.

Among other new features, Dragon 12 now supports Wideband Bluetooth audio, which will enable a 25 percent increase in accuracy for compatible wireless headsets. The software now also works better with Gmail and Hotmail on recent versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer. Nuance has also released an Android version of its Dragon Remote Mic app, which lets you use your phone as a Dragon input on your computer.

Unfortunately, Dragon still looks pretty much the same as it did in 2005. Running the software on a Windows 7 machine feels jarring, since it’s using the same interface as it did back in the Windows XP days. Given just how much more ubiquitous speech recognition is becoming in mobile devices thanks to Nuance, I’m hoping the company steps it up with a more modern-looking Dragon for the next version. With the release of Mountain Lion yesterday, Apple has also made Nuance-powered dictation a standard part of its OS, which makes the need for a sophisticated voice dictation suite even less relevant (Dragon 12 is only available for PCs).

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 is available for pre-order now and will ship the week of August 13 starting at $99.99.

Photo via Shutterstock

Continuing its trend of large company purchases, the voice recognition company Nuance announced today that it will purchase Transcend, a popular medical transcription company, for $300 million in cash.

The deal follows Nuance’s recent purchases of rival Vlingo and the alternative keyboard company Swype. The company has built up a habit of acquiring smaller companies to expand its voice-technology portfolio, but it has been criticized for bullying some of those companies through lawsuits. Its technology also rose to prominence recently since it powers Apple’s virtual assistant Siri.

“The acquisition of Transcend will expand the delivery of our innovative voice and Clinical Language Understanding solutions especially to small- and mid-size hospitals,” said Janet Dillione, Nuance’s general manager of Healthcare and executive vice president, in a statement today. “With Transcend, we will drive change and improvement to the way these hospitals capture and leverage clinical information. The acquisition is a natural extension of Nuance’s existing healthcare business, and will strengthen our solution and services portfolio, as well as enhance our profitability.”

Nuance says that it will acquire Transcend at $29.50 per share, a 30 percent premium over the company’s average share price from the past 90 days. Both boards have already approved the merger, and Nuance says it expects the purchase to add between $140 million and $150 million in revenue for the fiscal year 2013.

First aid screen image via Shutterstock

Patently Apple has found a filing by Google that lays out new ways for a person to control and communicate with their TV by speaking into a satellite computing device, such as a smartphone, tablet, or possibly a remote control. The document covers how Siri-like voice commands would be transmitted to a TV, describes a mobile-optimized TV interface for smartphones and tablets, and touts the advantages of teaming up multiple computing devices.

The patent describes a variety of possible communication setups. You could speak a command into your Android smartphone (“record Nightline tonight”), then the audio would bounce to the Internet, be translated to text, and the text sent to your TV. (Many TVs aren’t likely to have speech-to-text features, so translation would have to take place before the command hits the set.) There is also a description of a direct device-to-TV communication over Wi-Fi, as well as a voice command being sent to remote servers to be translated, then returning to the smartphone and transmitted to the TV directly.

The technology would allow you to switch channels or control what your TV records from anywhere using an Android handset. One use described in the patent is being able to use a smartphone to turn on your TV or start playing music when you’re up to a quarter-mile away from the television, which seems neat and a fun way to pranking your family, if not terribly useful.

As with all patents, the actual execution could take any number of forms. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ultrabooks will start out with touchscreens, but they will eventually add voice controls as well, said Mooly Eden, vice president and general manager of Intel’s PC Client Group in a press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show. Some of the Ultrabooks will be convertible, meaning they can be used as either laptops or tablets.

The Ultrabooks can also be designed with accelerometers or gyroscopes built into them, so you can pick up an Ultrabook and move it around to make things happen on the screen via motion sensing.

Nuance voice technology will let you can control an Ultrabook in nine languages.

Intel’s Nikiski notebook technology senses if your palm is touching a palm rest and touch pad on a computer. If it detects that your palm is touching the touch pad, it will consider the touches to be accidental wrist brushes and ignore them. But if you put a finger on the touch pad, it allows you to move around the cursor on the screen.

Eden also said that you’ll be able to control a laptop with motion controls by waving your hand in front of a screen.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Nuance’s purchase of Swype, maker of an alternative keyboard for smartphones, is finally beginning to pay off with the introduction of Nuance’s Dragon voice recognition on the latest Swype Android app.

Swype’s software keyboard lets you swipe to type text, instead of hunting and pecking virtual keys. With its latest update, Swype has replaced Google’s built-in voice recognition for Nuance’s Dragon Dictate technology, which currently supports English, Spanish, Italian, German, and French.

Given that Dragon is the result of years voice recognition by Nuance, it will likely be far more accurate than Google’s solution. Dragon also powers the dictation capabilities in Apple’s Siri virtual assistant, which means that by installing Swype, Android users will have dictation capabilities similar to the iPhone 4S. (In my experience, Siri’s dictation has consistently been more accurate than Google’s.)

Aside from Dragon integration, the latest Swype version also lets you install new keyboard languages from inside its keyboard preferences. It also offers a better language modeling algorithm, which supposedly lets Swype better understand common phrases.

Earlier this week, Nuance announced that it will acquire its voice recognition competitor Vlingo, which could lead to some massive improvements in its dictation software down the line.

The updated app is available to all Swype users currently from within the app’s preference panel. You may already have Swype installed on your Android phone without even knowing it, but if not, you can download the Swype Beta software.

Via The Verge

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple fans who expected an iPhone 5 today were disappointed.

Instead, all Apple unveiled was a phone that’s 2 times faster, with 7 times faster graphics rendering. It’s got a battery that’s good for a full day of talking, almost, and more than 3 solid days of listening to music.

The camera is substantially improved, with a faster, f2.4 lens and an 8 megapixel sensor, and it records 1080p HD video.

It’s a worldphone, meaning it will work on just about any cellular network around the world, both CDMA and GSM.

Oh, and you can talk to your phone, and it will answer your questions, thanks to a new feature called Siri. It knows who you’re sending messages to, where you are, and even knows who your wife is, as Apple’s Scott Forstall somewhat creepily said. The result: You can ask it for directions, currency conversions and restaurant recommendations, and you can hold down the home button and tell your phone “Remind me to call my wife when I leave work today,” and it will do it.

Leave it to Apple fans to be disappointed when their favorite company announces something that blows away just about every other competing product in technical sophistication, speed and price.

What we didn’t get today was a phone with a redesigned look or a larger screen. Some were hoping Apple would increase its screen size from the current 3.5-inch display to a more impressive 4-inch or larger display, like many Android-based competitors have done. And some were hoping Apple would move away from its obsession with glass and give its phone a slightly more sturdy back. None of those hopes panned out.

On the other hand, today’s announcement is pretty damn impressive.

There’s even something for the low end of the market: You can now get an iPhone 3GS for free (and that phone, another seemingly incremental upgrade, has sold very well over the years).

Apple releases products on its own timeline. And it doesn’t worry too much about inflating its products’ names (it could easily have decided to call today’s phone the iPhone 5, for instance).

Cook definitely exaggerated when he said “Only Apple can make amazing hardware, software and services and bring them together in an integrated experience.” Other companies can do that, too. But Apple does it very well. No matter what you call it, the iPhone 4S is an impressive product that’s well-integrated into an even more impressive suite of software and services.

As Dan Frommer writes, “If you’re disappointed by the iPhone 4S, you’re nuts.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple showed off its new voice assistant, Siri, a voice control feature available on its mobile operating system iOS, today at a special press event in Cupertino, Calif.

From what I can tell from the demo, Siri is the equivalent of handing your phone to another person sitting beside you and instructing them on what you want to do with it — sort of like many people have experienced when driving and trying to find something on their phones. (And as TWiT host Leo Laporte mentioned, Siri also adds a whole new level of “Damn you auto correct!”).

Siri will to transform the way you access things on a device by making speech a key component of navigation and discovery. You can now ask your phone and tablet computer to pull up contacts, recommend a restaurant, search Wikipedia, find out the daily weather forecast and way more.

“You can ask Siri about the weather. ‘What is the weather like today?’” Siri: “Here is the weather for today,” Apple’s Phil Schiller said during the live demonstration. Another demonstration of Siri showed it consulting Wolfram Alpha to find out how many days there are until Christmas.

For now, it seems that Siri only works with native iOS apps. It’ll be interesting to see if Apple opens this up once its out of beta testing.

Apple began working on a voice assistant feature in April 2010 after purchasing Siri. The new feature is based on artificial intelligence technology that Apple acquired from Siri, which allows users to ask for places to eat using normal spoken words.

The announcement of Siri was predicted by several people after many developers noticed voice control components within the  iOS 5 beta, the latest version of the operating system available to developers to create and test applications.

This story is developing. Please refresh the page for updates.

Images via Engadget

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The popular iPad notetaking app Noterize has been acquired by Nuance, the company most famous for its Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software, the Unofficial Apple Weblog reports.

With many rumors pointing to Apple including Nuance’s technology in its upcoming iOS 5, the Noterize purchase seems particularly telling. One of the most popular uses of Dragon on desktops is to dictate and edit documents, so it’s certainly worth it for Nuance to have a solid iOS document editor in its stable. Nuance will then only need to tack on voice recognition capabilities to have a new flagship app ready for iOS 5 this fall.

Nuance’s technology could end up being more useful for notetaking on mobile devices than it is on desktops. Apple’s iOS devices all generally rely on software keyboards (excluding the iPad’s hardware keyboard accessory), which generally make typing and editing documents overly difficult. Having voice control for dictation, annotation and other editing tasks could end up being a godsend for many users. It would also help iOS remain competitive against Android, which has Google’s own voice-to-text service available throughout the OS.

As a result of the purchase, Noterize has been taken down from Apple’s App Store. The app joins other strategic purchases Nuance has made over the last few years, including voice-to-text services Jott and Spinvox.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Update: Wozniak now says he was “totally wrong” about the Nuance purchase. Original story below.
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Apple may have bought the voice recognition company Nuance, the creator of the popular Dragon Naturally Speaking software, according to a brief statement by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in a video by Romil Patel of TVDeck.

Wozniak briefly mentions that Apple bought Nuance when speaking about the importance of voice recognition technology for mobile devices. He mentioned that natural speech will allow users to “get normal human things done” with your computer, and it will become a common mode of input. The news was first reported by 9to5Mac.

Now Wozniak could be talking about Siri, creator of a personal assistant app for the iPhone that Apple bought in April, but he was also clear to mention Siri separately as a service that uses Nuance’s technology.

We’ve asked both Nuance and Apple for comment on the matter and will update when we hear back.

For now, I consider this news to be very speculative — but I honestly don’t think it’s all that crazy. Valued at over $5 billion, Nuance would be an easy purchase for Apple, which has over $50 billion in cash on hand. Buying Nuance, provider of the most well-known and fully featured consumer voice recognition software on the market, is also much easier for Apple than developing voice recognition technology of its own (for use with Siri’s software, and elsewhere).

But as likely as the Nuance buy may be, we should probably take Wozniak’s comments with a grain of salt at this point. He made news last week when he reportedly said that Google’s Android platform would win the smartphone wars. He later clarified his statements, but didn’t fully negate the original remarks. And in the height of the Toyota sudden acceleration frenzy, Wozniak also said publicly that he saw the problem with his 2010 Prius — even though he was most likely referring to the car’s adaptive cruise control.

[Front page photo: OnInnovation]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google is shutting down its voice recognition directory assistance service, GOOG-411, come November after using the service to firm up its voice recognition technology for future projects.

The search giant didn’t get into specifics as to what the tech would be applied to, but it list a few general areas: voice search, voice input and voice actions on smartphones running Google’s Android operating system.

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Google’s making a move into voice recognition technology — Google CEO Eric Schmidt has made it abundantly clear that Google’s future plans would involve mobile devices that simply “got things done.” That including asking a smartphone a question and getting an answer, he said at the San Francisco TechCrunch Disrupt conference last month.

Google has offered the free directory assistance service, that  allows callers to say business names and locations and be connected to them, since 2007. The service was fully automated, and Google said the technology formed the foundation for its voice recognition technology.

It could be a sign of a voice recognition war brewing in the near future, as Apple has also recently begun shoring up its voice recognition technology. The iPhone manufacturer picked up Siri in April to improve its voice recognition technology.

[Photo: Robert Scoble]

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