2.3 would kick off a series of continual revamps in an attempt to turn Android from an ugly duckling into something that was capable of holding its own-aesthetically-against the iPhone.Īnd speaking of Apple, six months earlier, the company released the iPhone 4 and iOS 4, which added multitasking and Facetime video chat. It was the first major overhaul since the initial formation of Android in version 0.9. The wait was worth it, though, as Android 2.3 changed just about every screen in the OS. Gingerbread was released in December 2010, a whopping seven months after the release of 2.2. Android 2.3 Gingerbread-the first major UI overhaul The Nexus S, the first Nexus phone made by Samsung. When Google's robot division gets off the ground with a real robot, it will need to see and hear, and Google's computer vision and hearing projects will likely give the company a head start. Just like the days of GOOG-411, these projects are in the early stages. That's why things like Google Goggles, Google Image Search, and Project Tango exist. With the computer hearing system up and running, Google is applying this strategy to computer vision next. Most other voice recognition products, like Apple’s Siri and Samsung devices, are forced to use-and pay a license fee for-voice recognition from Nuance. Voice is the future of many products, and this long-term planning has led Google to be one of the few major tech companies with an in-house voice recognition service. The transcription is even indexed by Google, so you can search for words that were said in the video. Google's voice recognition technology is used to transcribe YouTube videos, which powers automatic closed captioning for the hearing impaired. It’s also the primary input interface for Google Glass and Android Wear. It’s used for voice input in the Google Search app, Android’s voice typing, and on. Today, voice recognition powers products all across Google. Voice recognition was a great example of Google’s extremely long-term thinking-the company wasn't afraid to invest in a project that wouldn’t become a commercial product for several years. No humans were involved in the lookup process, the 411 service was powered by voice recognition and a text-to-speech engine. Voice Actions was only possible after three years of the public teaching Google how to hear. ![]() It worked just like 411 information services had for years-users could call the number and ask for a phone book lookup-but Google offered it for free. 1-800-GOOG-411 was a free phone information service that Google launched in April 2007. Voice recognition had been a project of Google’s for some time, and it all started with an 800 number. Using the power of the Internet, Android put a supercomputer in your pocket, and, compared to existing solutions, moving the voice recognition workload from a pocket-sized computer to a room-sized computer greatly increased accuracy. ![]() ![]() The software didn't need to be individually “trained" by each user, because everyone who used Voice Actions was training it all the time. Google was doing hardcore compute operations in the cloud, and because it is throwing a ridiculous amount of CPU power at the problem, the only limit to the voice recognition accuracy is the algorithms themselves. Many people throw the phrase “cloud computing" around to mean “anything that is stored on a server," but this was actual cloud computing. It was a long journey, but the Internet was finally fast enough to accomplish something like this in a second or two. There, Google’s farm of supercomputers pored over the message, interpreted it, and shipped it back to the phone. When a command was spoken, the user’s voice was packaged up and shipped out over the Internet to Google’s cloud servers. Google’s innovation was not bothering to do the voice recognition computing on the phone’s limited processor. In fact, many voice recognition programs still have a “speed versus accuracy" setting, where users can choose how long they are willing to wait for the voice recognition algorithms to work-more CPU power means better accuracy. ![]() In general, voice recognition was very CPU intensive. Voice Actions was the most advanced voice control software for its time, and the secret was that Google wasn’t doing any computing on the device. Voice Actions was the culmination of a new app design philosophy for Google.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |