As an end-to-end voice interface solution built on powerful AI technologies, MindMeld sits at the intersection of fascinating and highly dynamic fields. Curious what’s been going on in these areas since our 4/28 update? Most notably, tech’s biggest heavy-hitters have been making some decisive moves and interesting announcements.
- Facebook is testing the introduction of a name pronunciation guide on a select number of users. Could this mean they’re considering adding voice search? Time will tell.
- Google launched custom voice actions for a select number of partners. This means a command like “OK Google, show attractions near me on TripAdvisor” will now work on your Android.
- Microsoft is also strengthening the relationship between third-party apps and its own IVR Cortana. Microsoft wants voice commands to trigger app actions without launching the app (for instance, ordering an Uber via Cortana).
- John Gagnon of Bing Ads gives an interesting shout-out to voice search at the PPC conference Hero Conf Portland. His slides feature some cool stats, including that 24% of Bing searches are activated by voice!
- A team from the University of Surrey in the U.K. trained a neural network to recognize the unique “fingerprint” of voice in spectrograms, so it becomes much easier to separate voice from music in songs.