I really enjoyed reading this article interviewing Vlad Sejnoha, Nuance’s CTO. Most people would consider Nuance the leader in speech recognition today, and Vlad is certainly a very smart, thoughtful, and articulate man.
I enjoyed it for a few different reasons. The first and main reason I liked the article is it helps to push the idea Sensory has been championing for the past several years that devices don’t have to be touched to enable voice commands, and that you should be able to just start talking to things like we talk to each other. That’s what Sensory calls TrulyHandsfree, and it’s the technology that showed up in the first Bluetooth carkit that requires no touching (by BlueAnt) AND the first mobile phones that responded to voice without touch (Samsungs Galaxy SII and SIII and Note). Even hit toys like Mattel’s award winning Fijit Friends and Hallmarks Interactive Books use this unique technology that just works when you talk to it. In fact, it really was the TrulyHandsfree feature that made Vlingo so popular, as this Vlingo video nicely states in its comparison between Vlingo and Siri. (Nuance bought Vlingo earlier this year, but the Sensory TrulyHandsfree didn’t come with it!).
The article says “Sejnoha believes that within a year or two you’ll be able to talk to your smartphone even as it lies idle on a desk, asking it questions such as, “When’s my next appointment?” The phone will be able to detect that you are speaking, wake itself up, and accomplish the task at hand.” Check out this Sensory video…this is definitely what Vlad is talking about! Yeah, we can do it today, and it’s REALLY FAST and really accurate.
But is it low power? Well that’s ABSOLUTELY KEY. That’s why Sensory partnered with Tensilica. Tensilica is a leader in low power audio DSP’s for Mobile Phones. Sensory already has its TrulyHandsfree running on chips that run under 5 mW for a COMPLETE audio system. And that’s without having to wake up to understand the task at hand. We can drop by another 1-2mW by not being always on, but turning the recognizer off doesn’t do much. That’s because even if the full recognizer is shut down, you still need to run a mic and preamp, which drives a lot of the current consumption when you have a low power recognizer like TrulyHandsfree (it can run on as little as 7 MIPS!). This means it’s REALLY critical to have a low power recognizer as well, and that’s Sensory’s forte. We are expecting that by next year we will have systems running at 1-3mW!
The article mentions “persistent” listening, but even though I’ve always preached this “always on” concept, I think what will really explode is “intelligent automatic listening”. That is, the device figures out when it needs to listen for what and turns on to listen for it. So it doesn’t always have to be on…it will just seem that way because the devices are so intelligent. For example a certain traveling speed could make a phone listen for car commands or car wake up words. An incoming call could cause the recognizer to wake up and listen for Answer/Ignore. For these to work, the device needs to run not only at very low power but also with VERY high accuracy. You don’t want to have a background conversation triggering the phone call to hang up! Accuracy is another Sensory forte! The combination of accuracy with low power consumption is a difficult mix to conquer! Sensory’s accuracy is not only in noise but also from a distance…that is when a recognizer works well with a poor S/N ratio, that means the signal can be lower (like from distance) and/or the noise can be higher.
So it’s really cool that Nuance is getting on the bandwagon behind Sensory’s innovations like TrulyHandsfree at low power. In fact after Samsungs release on the Galaxy SII with Sensory, Nuance did come out with an always “on and listening mobile device”; for fun we quickly ported our technology onto the same phone to compare…check out this video.
Something interesting we noticed was that after Sensory announced its speaker verification and speaker ID for mobile devices at CTIA this year, Nuance shortly thereafter came out with their own announcement, but there were no demo’s available so we couldn’t do a comparison video.