Apple's New Data Center Focus of Nuance Voice Recognition Partnership?

[FatMax]

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I don't get it. Why are we supposed to speak to our iDevices ? This is just silly!

 

[Full of Win]

How long before TechCrunch reports that there are rumors that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Apple's NC data center?

(too soon?)

Actually the data center will house Steve Jobs mind in a few years. He will control Apple even after has earthly body has gone. It will be like Lawnmower Man...but worse.

 

[DrFreeman]

How on earth would net-based voice recognition be "faster"? Faster than what, driving to Apple HQ and asking a question?

I think it may be referring to Google service. Google has built a server farm, 1000 servers. They use genetic algorithms to detect the language and the rest of the story.

The point would be that you would call someone in Japan and you hear him in English and he hears you in Japanese Google already doing that!

 

[ryanwarsaw]

It doesnt remove **** stains in your underwear. Thats the only thing I can think of.

I have reliable inside sources that say otherwise.

 

[shartypants]

I hope whatever they ultimately come out with actually works! Google's voice recognition is pretty good, I'm impressed, hopefully this one will be just as good or better.

 

[Full of Win]

You clearly have no understanding of the technology. I recommend you try Google's voice search. It also does the work on their servers. And the app only has to transmit very limited information, not exactly the whole waveform of your blubbering.

Never said it was going to send an entire recording of my voice.

The low end plan has 200 MB per month, or about 6.5 MB per day. Are you saying that extensive use of this will not take up a good bit of this per day? If it uses 1 MB per day, then it will take ~15% of the data package.

 

[Glideslope]

Kirk: "Mr. Spock, full sensor scan of object".

Spock: "Computer, structural analysis, and make up of object to port of Enterprise".

Computer: "Computing".

Computer: "Object appears to contain early 21st century remains of Humanoids."
"There appears to be a digital recording encoded on silicone." "Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us."

Spock: Looks at Kirk, and raises 1 eyebrow.

 

[coolfactor]

Looking at that data centre, the thought that crosses my mind is "that's an awfully large and easy target"... with Apple becoming such a huge mainstream part of our daily lives, an outage at that data centre would have serious repercussions. Let's hope that they have a diverse network of storage outside that centre.

 

[ciTiger]

Voice recognition! Nice! Yeah the data center seems to be good for everything lol

 

[Michael Scrip]

I'm assuming Apple will be able to monetize voice searches, right?

This data center cost a billion dollars...

 

[addicted44]

How on earth would net-based voice recognition be "faster"? Faster than what, driving to Apple HQ and asking a question?

Nothing worse than people who don't know anything about this spouting off.

Voice recognition is ridiculously computationally heavy. Also, good voice recognition will possibly have huge audio databases to lookup against.

There is no way that an iPhone can manage that and maintain a decent battery life.

 

[kjs862]

Why didn't Apple just buy Nuance?

Or does anyone know if Apple made an attempt to buy Nuance?

 

[iSee]

Based on all the rumors, what DOESN'T the NC data center do?

Yeah... This is one of these standard follow-up rumors:

Initial Rumor: Apple is buying/developing/investing in Technology _
Standard Follow-up Rumor: Apple will be using NC Data Center for Technology _

Never fails

Apple will probably need to build another massive data center (let's say in South Carolina this time) if it's going to support all these rumored services.

 

[JAT]

Well since you will have your itunes library available to stream..... and your ical and documents uploaded to icloud....
"play (artist) (song)" or "calender for (month, date, time)"

Uh, are YOU going to give me 2TB of cloud storage? I'm at 1TB, now, haven't got all the video and photos on disk, yet.

Nothing worse than people who don't know anything about this spouting off.

Voice recognition is ridiculously computationally heavy. Also, good voice recognition will possibly have huge audio databases to lookup against.

There is no way that an iPhone can manage that and maintain a decent battery life.

Ok, I'll have to stop using the current vr, then. Thanks for the tip. I'll also tell my coworker to delete Dragon from his phone, obviously it couldn't actually be working for him.

 

[fishmoose]

Why didn't Apple just buy Nuance?

Or does anyone know if Apple made an attempt to buy Nuance?

The Techcrunch article speculates Apple would think it's too expensive. I find that a little unsatisfactory I believe if Apple wanted them they'd buy them at any price. Maybe they'll buy them in the future if the co-op works out.

 

[ipedro]

iOS5's killer feature: Real time conversational voice recognition

voice recognition is so useless and dumb, can u imagine all those ppl talking to their gadget on the tram

Short sighted people are always amusing to point at when everybody's adopted the new technology they said was useless and dumb just months prior to it becoming a hit.

Voice recognition hasn't taken off for a couple of reasons:

1 - It's not quite accurate enough so you have to speak at an unnatural speed and tone.

2 - Current technology is mostly one way so you still have to view the screen to communicate properly because you can't yet trust that the system will be correct within an acceptable ratio.

Apple's acquisition of Siri solves both of these.

Imagine having a conversation with your iPhone without thinking in pre-determined commands and being confident that it understands you and will act appropriately.

Instead of:

- Click and hold a button
- Wait for prompt
- "Play Song 'Beat it' "
- Verify that it got it right

- Begin next command...

You'll be able to do this:

"iPhone, play 'Beat it', make an appointment for lunch with Wendy on Tuesday at noon. Oh, also I need to get groceries today. I need potatoes, pasta, steaks and apples and send this to my wife too."

iPhone replies: Playing 'Beat It' by Michael Jackson. I've created an iCal appointment for 12pm this Tuesday for 'Lunch with Wendy'. I've set up a Task named "Groceries" and listed "potatoes, pasta, steaks and apples" and have shared it with Debbie.

This kind of real time interpretation requires a lot of power and constant refinement not possible in a battery powered mobile device. Instead, a small file containing a mono audio snipit can be sent to Apple's servers, interpreted and commands sent back within a few seconds, making this possible.

Look to iOS5 as being the beginning of a true personal assistant that you can speak to but that is also able to speak with you in a natural conversation.

Apple was indeed years ahead of the competition with the introduction of the iPhone and I doubt they've been sitting on their hands waiting for Android to catch up.

They've been working on the next killer feature that will once again push the boundaries and propel Apple way ahead of the pack. This type of conversational speech recognition definitely has the ability to do this.

 

[iSee]

How on earth would net-based voice recognition be "faster"? Faster than what, driving to Apple HQ and asking a question?

I guess it's like this (this is conjecture -- hopefully someone knowledgeable can provide corrections and details):

Voice recognition could be made more accurate across a wider range of inputs with access to large databases and a lot of computing power.


If true, then a remote VR service could be significantly better than a local, iOS VS service.

So not necessarily faster, since that depends a lot on the connection you have and how much processing power is really needed, but better.

 

[uaecasher]

voice recognition is so useless and dumb, can u imagine all those ppl talking to their gadget on the tram

exactly my thoughts, the reason i think voice recognition never went off is that because there is no privacy in it. I don't want to tell my iPhone: "Call some person name" in a public place, or tell it to play a song.

 

[JAT]

Short sighted people are always amusing to point at when everybody's adopted the new technology they said was useless and dumb just months prior to it becoming a hit.

Voice recognition hasn't taken off for a couple of reasons:

To be fair, a major issue you didn't list (and probably the other guy's point) is being in public with other voices around. The voice software can't exactly control the microphone to block other voices. Not yet, anyway. And it will never be able to cope with noise that simply drowns out parts of your speech.

 

[patohi]

Uh, are YOU going to give me 2TB of cloud storage? I'm at 1TB, now, haven't got all the video and photos on disk, yet.

Ok, I'll have to stop using the current vr, then. Thanks for the tip. I'll also tell my coworker to delete Dragon from his phone, obviously it couldn't actually be working for him.

1TB???? as long as your willing to pay! Google wants $256.00 per year for that amount. I'm sure apple will come in with similar pricing...

As for itunes streaming or ical use why not???? apple just needs the one file of a song to stream... They are trying to catch up with google in the cloud game...

 

[dethmaShine]

If this helps in Phone Sex, I'm in bitch.

 

[DocNYz]

Yeah... This is one of these standard follow-up rumors:

Initial Rumor: Apple is buying/developing/investing in Technology _
Standard Follow-up Rumor: Apple will be using NC Data Center for Technology _

Never fails

Apple will probably need to build another massive data center (let's say in South Carolina this time) if it's going to support all these rumored services.

Haha yeah this reminds me of when apps first came out someone made a diagram to categorize them and like 90% of the paths ended up defining the app as a flashlight.

 

[WestonHarvey1]

Uh, are YOU going to give me 2TB of cloud storage? I'm at 1TB, now, haven't got all the video and photos on disk, yet.

Ok, I'll have to stop using the current vr, then. Thanks for the tip. I'll also tell my coworker to delete Dragon from his phone, obviously it couldn't actually be working for him.

Dragon works over the network. The speech recognition engine is not running on the iPhone. It is just sending audio to the server for processing.

The Voice Control built into iOS is similar to what is running on the Mac. It is not very sophisticated and can't handle dictation or the kinds of things being discussed here.

Nuance is big software - in terms of disk space required, CPU utilization, and memory requirements. Ask anyone who has integrated it with telephony systems (I have). You wouldn't want this running on the iPhone. It would have to be running at all times to be responsive. It would use a lot if not all of the iPhone's resources and it would kill the battery.

Speech recognition is not some web 2.0 mashup that some aspiring hacker can whip up in a few lines of PHP code. It is many decades and billions of dollars of research. It is one of the hardest problems in computer science and Nuance is practically the only player left in the game.

 

[NAG]

Actually the data center will house Steve Jobs mind in a few years. He will control Apple even after has earthly body has gone. It will be like Lawnmower Man...but worse.

Or if Apple is actually Aperture they'd end up putting Katie Cotton in there instead.

 

[Lone Deranger]

I still believe The North Carolina data-center is SkyNet in disguise. Once it becomes self-aware it will launch it's missiles against the targets at Google.