It’s a scientific research company that was founded last year by professor Geoffrey Hinton from the University of Toronto, along with graduate students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever. Their research is focused on the understanding of “deep neural networks” and Hinton is already known for his work in speech recognition, language understanding and computer vision.

Presumably, the idea here would be to improve the user experience with a variety of Google products. You could see how better speech and object recognition would vastly improve the performance of Google Glass, for example, just as it would be utterly fantastic for Google Goggles, Google Now, and all sorts of other Google innovations within and outside of the Android sphere. The two grad students will work with Google full-time, whereas the professor will split his time between work for Google and his academic duties in Toronto.

[Source]

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With 2012  nearly over, we love taking a look back at some of the most innovative mobile technologies making their way into the “mainstream” this year.

Keep in mind that most of these innovations actually started years ago, but they make this year’s list simply because they went mainstream or showed up for the first time in a high-demand flagship device.

I am not going to number this as a “countdown of the best”, because each of these technologies bring new things to the mobile world and how important they are is really a matter of opinion.

This is by no means a definitive list; we are also  focusing on technologies in phones and tablets, not the devices themselves, though several hot items like the iPad, Nokia Lumia 920 and LG Nexus 4 certainly have technology present that makes this list.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Did we miss something monumental? Do you disagree with our top innovation choices? Let us know in the comments below!

The post Top Mobile Technology Innovations of 2012 appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Microsoft Research is now working on taking speech-recognition to new heights, forget current technologies like SIRI. This is a language translating technology that takes real speech and translates it on the fly. Even cooler, it can actually “speak” what you are saying into a different language as well.

This Star Trek-esque universal translator is far from a commercial project and will likely not make its way into any real product for decades, maybe longer. Still, that’s not the point. As you watch the video, you’ll see that the text translation of everything the Microsoft Researcher says tags along (a little slowly) afterward. Is it a perfect voice recognition system yet? No. For the most part, the English-to-English text on the board was pretty close 70% or higher. That’s not bad considering he was just talking like normal.

We might have these kind of technologies available commercially right now, but we often have to baby them and talk to them like “a computer” instead of a more natural flow like you’d have when talking to another person.

The big “WOW” factor comes when he starts speaking and the software starts translating it into Chinese. Not only was it equally as quick at recognizing the spoken words, but it provided the option to “speak” the Chinese translation back to the audience and in a similar style and sound to the speaker’s own voice.

We have a long way to go on such technologies, but the implications are huge.

Are there some downsides to the idea, too? Sure. For one thing, such technology arguably makes us lazier. Most of us that are going to a foreign country for a visit at least attempt to learn local phrases in order to help us get by and get where we need to go without looking like a fool. Learning a little culture, etiquette and language is just part of the experience.

If such a technology offered perfect translations, many travelers might take the “Why Bother?” approach. When it comes to culture, customs, currency– we’d have our smartphones there to fetch what we need to know right then as well. Nonetheless, this is really cool. What do you think of the translator technology? Are we still decades off from such tech really being useful?

[ source ]

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In this case, Google has banned the Siri knockoff app that was making its rounds on the Android Market, which is good for them considering the app called “Siri for Android” is nowhere near the proficiency of the actual Siri’s performance on the iPhone 4S. In fact, Google’s banhammer has also fallen upon the developer, which means you won’t hear from the developer on the Android Market any more from now onwards.

While there are numerous Siri clones already available on the Market, this “Siri” app didn’t even try. When you download the app, all you’re getting is a shortcut to launch Google Voice Actions – a feature that’s already available on most Android devices and can be launched by holding down the search key. Then, it’s very problematic to claim that Google Voice capabilities can even touch the level of speech recognition qualities of Apple’s Siri on iPhone 4S. However when these other “Siri clones” are not positioned as such, that is, without a claim that they are “Siri for Android, and use native Android STT technology (Speech-To-Text), they are perfectly legit, if limited. Samples of these are Vlingo Voice-To-Text app and Iris app that can talk back to you.

My take on this is that along with introducing stricter rules for admission of apps to Android Market, Google might want to dedicate an extra effort to developing a Siri-like functionality of its own.

The post Android’s Siri “Clone” Removed From Android Market appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

I’m not completely convinced on the name, since it sounds like it’s the beginning of a cheesy kung-fu movie, but Dragon for iPhone could prove to be quite the handy app. In short, it’s a voice transcription application that will turn what you say into written words on the screen.

The speech recognition software comes from Nuance, the same company that powers the native voice dialing app on the BlackBerry. With Dragon, you can just say what you want and it’ll work with text messages, e-mails, or just about anywhere else thanks to the iPhone clipboard. In time, they’ll let you use it with Search, Wikipedia, Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, YouTube, iTunes, and more.

The best part about Dragon for iPhone is the price. It’s free. Find it in the App Store and download at will.

Source: Intomobile

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