I haven’t had much time to blog lately, and you may have noticed that when I do, I often write about our revolutionary new Truly Handsfree™ Trigger speech technology. Technically it’s a phrase-spotting technology, but Sensory is using a revolutionary new multi-patent pending approach that’s changing the way we do speech recognition. The Truly Handsfree™ Trigger doesn’t use typical techniques like background noise modeling or speech detection (i.e. start and ending speech.) In operation, it ends up being MUCH more noise robust, yet still very efficient as it consumes less current than it would if we also included all the traditional approaches. The basic idea is that it’s on and listening all the time, and able to reject all of the wrong words and correctly identify the right words! This eliminates the need for activation via button pressing.
A lot of companies are using our technology now as a voice trigger for other speech recognition applications. At the recent Mobile World Congress, Samsung introduced the first Truly Handsfree Smartphone, the Galaxy sII, which uses a Truly Handsfree™ Trigger followed by the Vlingo experience. You say “Hey Galaxy” and it wakes up, no touching necessary! I tried this on the noisy showroom floor at Mobile World Congress, and it nailed my “Hey Galaxy” every time, even from a distance of 5 feet away!
Chris Schreiner over at Strategy Analytics recently tried out an early beta demo for Android, and in a blog late last year he said, “In a demo experience on my Android phone, the hands-free trigger worked remarkably well with varying types of background noise.”
With Truly Handsfree™ Trigger’s noise-robust nature and the ability to always be on listening, we are able to do more natural language-like schemes. A couple of great examples are in the toy space (and we do love toys at Sensory!)
- I mentioned Hallmark in my last blog…now they are rolling out a whole new product line built with Sensory chips because of the huge success of Jingle, the Husky Pup.
- Mattel has pushed us to deploy this phrase spotting technology even in our lowest cost, entry level processor. They have a new product line coming out this year that’s for sure to be a BIG HIT called Fijit. The Fijit’s are these cute wiggly characters with amazing skin, and they do the TOUGHEST speech recognition feats ever. They listen for a bunch (30??) of short key words like “hungry” so you can say a variety of things to it (Like…Hungry?…I’m Hungry…Are you Hungry?) and it can intelligently respond and interact. (Actually I don’t know if “Hungry” is a one of its actual words, that’s for example only.) SpeechTech just did a nice summary on Fiji Friends in their blog, and Mattel has some nice YouTube videos and websites where you can learn all about Fijits.
So what’s happening here at Sensory is that this technology initially invented as a trigger is migrating into being an amazingly noise-robust speech solution for any command and control application! It’s nominated for awards by MobileTrax in both the Speech Processing and Software Technology innovation categories!
Sensory has developed a whole product roadmap around our new approach, and this includes speaker adaptive recognition, larger vocabulary solutions, improvements in accuracy, and consumer created triggers. A funny thing about consumer created triggers…Our initial release was NOT INTENDED for this, but one of our customers, Adelavoice, did a few tricks and allowed end users to create their own triggers. Know what’s the most common trigger phrase?? “Yo Bitch”…I guess that says something about the demographic of the user base!
OK…I could go on and on about this new phrase spotting technology, but I gotta get some real work done!