Time flies, particularly during these warm summer days. It has been over a month since our latest industry update, and in these breakthrough subfields of technology, that’s a good chunk of time.
The big media buzz lately has been over the Amazon Echo. While it becomes purchasable to U.S. customers on Amazon’s website on July 14th, the voice-activated cylinder/speaker/assistant has been living long enough in the homes of invited developers and journalists to have generated a substantial body of press and reviews. Unlike the general-purpose A.I. assistants that preceded it, the Echo doesn’t feature a small screen; it has no screen. This makes the Echo even more reliant on voice than smartwatches, and appropriately, Amazon has equipped the Echo with seven microphones, beam-forming and far-field voice recognition technology, and 360º omni-directional audio. Early reviews of the Echo laud it for its ability to hear words from a great distance or with music in the background.
Echo is Amazon’s stab at making a hub for the connected IoT home, and its design reflects the company’s strong confidence in the future of voice technology. “Experiences designed around the human voice will fundamentally improve the way people use technology,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement, and the company is putting substantial money behind that belief: the recently-announced Alexa Fund grants up to $1,000,000 to entrepreneurs expanding the capacities of voice-driven technology.
In other news:
Twitter acquired A.I. startup Whetlab, creators of patent-pending technology that helps companies use machine learning.
Google Now is more location-smart.
At Microsoft Research’s annual Faculty Summit, a streamable panel discussion will cover “Progress in AI: Myths, Realities, and Aspirations” and feature luminaries Eric Horvitz, Christopher Bishop, Fei-Fei Li, Oren Etzioni, Michael Littman, and Josh Tenenbaum.
The MindMeld team has been growing at a very fast clip, working on some really cool projects and helping companies add intelligent voice interfaces to their products. Voice revolution, here we come!