by MYLE Team | Feb 1, 2016 | Assistive Technology, Speech Recognition, Technologies |
Every day we start seeing more technologies powered by speech recognition software. We could oversee such innovation in the cars, smartphones, smartwatches, smart houses and other assistive technologies that are designed to ease our lives.
According to the new research study conducted by Parks Associates, 39% of smartphone owners use some speech recognition software such as Google Now or Siri. Also, 360 View: Mobility and the App Economy report states that more than one-half of iPhone owners use voice recognition feature while less than one-third of Android owners use such feature.
“Smartphone penetration has reached 86% of U.S. broadband households, so it is a mature market, with users, particularly younger consumers and iOS users, exploring more intelligent features and interfaces, including voice control,” said Harry Wang, Director, Health & Mobile Product Research, Parks Associates. “The growing consumer interest in voice control features is driving this technology into new IoT areas. At CES 2016, Vivint demonstrated voice control for home security via Amazon Echo, and Volvo showed voice control for connected cars via Cortana on Microsoft’s Health Band.”
Another key insight from the research is a significant increase by 12 per cent in the use of the voice recognition software among iPhone users from 40 per cent to 52 per cent between 2013 and 2015.
Additional report data shows:
- More than 70% of smartphone users watch short streaming video clips, and more than 40% watch long streaming videos.
- 36% of smartphone users use Wi-Fi calling.
- 26% of smartphone users use a payment app for purchases at a retail location.
- 24% of smartphone users stream video from the phone to a second screen (e.g., TV, PC).
If you’d like to find more information about 360 View: Mobility and the App Economy report, you can check it online at www.parksassociates.com. If you have any additional questions about data, or you’d like to schedule an interview with an analyst, contact Holly Sprague at [email protected]
by MYLE Team | Dec 30, 2015 | Assistive Technology, Healthcare Tech, MYLE, Speech Recognition |
What a tedious process of constantly reaching for the cell phone to check notifications, write the notes or send a message to a friend. You walk on the street, you pull out of your pocket a cell phone and – hunching over it to check something that you’ve thought would be relevant.
It turns out that the cell phones have a negative impact on our cervical spine. Are you wondering why they’re affecting cervical spine rather than our eyes?
According to the new research study conducted by Kenneth Hansraj, a chief spinal and orthopaedic surgeon at the New York Spine Surgery and Rehabilitation Medicine in the US, constantly bending head down to check the mobile device significantly harming the cervical spine.
Hansraj calculated how varying degrees of curvature adversely affected a person’s spine.
For instance, at zero degrees of tilt, the resting pressure is equal to the weight of the person’s head – five kg, or 10 pounds. However, for each 15 degrees of tilt, the pressure and the weight increase. You can see these changes on the image below. So at the maximum tilt, which is 60 degrees, a person feels around 27 kg or 60 pounds of force on the cervical spine.
This research is essential because people spend an average of two to four hours a day with their heads tilted over interacting with their smartphones and other mobile devices. Cumulatively this is 700 to 1400 hours a year of excess stress to the cervical spine.
These numbers can even be higher for the modern teens as they spend an extra 5,000 hours in poor posture.
This research shows that people should start spending less time hunching over their devices for tasks that could be done in different ways.
However, how can we stay as productive as we are now?
MYLE is an assistive technology that does your routine job for you. Whether you’re writing a message, a note, making a calendar meeting, or filling fitness or working logs.
This miniature device has a sleek design and powered with the latest breakthroughs in the speech recognition technologies. It lets you control your apps via only voice keeping your posture at zero degrees of tilt.
For instance, you can tap and say, “Email to Edward – ‘thank you for your respond, let’s meet afternoon tomorrow at the local coffee shop, – Jess.'”
Your message will be automatically converted to text and instantly sent to Edward letting him know that you received his message, and you’re going to wait for him at your local cozy coffee shop.
Thus, MYLE aims to do what Hansraj explains in his research,
“While it is nearly impossible to avoid the technologies that cause these issues, individuals should make an effort to look at their phones with a neutral spine and to avoid spending hours each day hunched over.”
by MYLE Team | Dec 7, 2015 | Assistive Technology, Speech Recognition, Technologies |
“Hey, find me the most interesting books about the history of the U.S., and also book me an appointment with my doctor next Tuesday.” Imagine that you said this phrase to your digital assistant, which would convert your words into text and then execute them within a few seconds. Think about the amount of time you would be able to save by communicating with the smart machines via voice? How efficient would this be for you in the time of information overload?
Today we’re going to start a series of articles about the speech recognition technology because it’s the future (well, it’s reality now rather than future) of communication with the smart machines. We’ll cover such topics on its benefits, hardware and software principle of operation and provide you with a brief history and key figures, who changed the way we look at the speech recognition today.
Decades ago, people would’ve gone crazy about the idea that a computer was able to recognize, understand, classify and execute spoken words into actions. Remember that Stanley Kubrick’s movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” where an intelligent computer “HAL” was able to understand and speak a fluent language. It brought up a viral idea that humans can talk to machines in the same way as humans do speak with each other.
Current market offers a variety of devices with built-in speech recognition technologies, and they’re available for both commercial and personal use. It’s worth to mention that speech recognition technology is still far from its full completion, because ideally it implies that all machines can understand and chat with humans on any topic like humans do talk to each other. However, scientific and technological advancement in the past 30 years have moved humans closer to the moment, when we will consider the machines as great chat partners, family friends, good advisors, co-workers and just an important part of our society.
Many people are still sometimes confused with the terms speech recognition and voice recognition technologies. So, speech recognition is the process of converting spoken words into digital data, when voice recognition is the process of identifying the person who is speaking.
Why do many tech companies pay the most attention and even build entire products around this technology?
Well, the speech was the first medium for humans to communicate with each other. If you look closer at the speech recognition history (we’ll cover that in the next article), then you’ll see that machines learned to understand a language in the same way as humans did. In the beginning, they (machines) could recognize only digits, then separate letters, words, phrases, sentences and recently they became able to understand complex requests.
Humans had a similar process in their evolution, but the only difference was that they learned how to convert produced sounds into words. It’s still unclear when humans began to communicate with each other using words, because speech, unlike writing, hasn’t left any historical prints. If you’re interested in origins of speech, then we highly recommend you do research on different theories about it.
So, if we can teach a machine to understand correctly and classify our words, then it will mean that machine is an intelligent system.
Using speech recognition in our devices, without which an average person is unlikely to exist, will lead us to the enormous time saving. Only imagine that an average American person receives around 100,000 words per day – the longest novel ever written is “Cyrus the Great,” written by Georges de Scudery and Madeleine de Scudery, has a length of 2,100,000 words or 13,095 pages, so you could spend around two weeks to finish that book easily. The length of an average novel is around 60,000 – 80,000 words. However, the information is going to grow rapidly over the next years.
We’ve reached a point – when we need some help from our “computer friends” to processing all data on the Internet. According to author Clem Chambers, computer technologies will be combined with AI allowing collective problem-solving on a larger scale and the creation of vast amounts of data.
Devices such as personal digital assistants powered by speech recognition technology are going to benefit our society by changing the way we work and communicate with each other.
Here are only some benefits of that technology: hands free, simply say a voice command and your device will execute it; simplicity of using it, there’s no need for typing, just say your command; fast and automated; can be integrated into any software system; multilingual, they understand different languages, so it’s easier to communicate with the other people, systems, and data; reliable and secure.
Speech recognition technology is crucial for MYLE, because language is the main remedy for a device to communicate with its user. Therefore, we work hard to develop and implement a machine learning algorithm that will recognize, understand, categorize and execute your words into data and actions.
If you want to learn how MYLE, Siri, Google Now and other digital assistants and other gadgets recognize and execute your commands based on what you said, then stay tuned and enjoy those articles. We hope to see you in the next post.
by Pavel Bondarev | Dec 2, 2015 | Assistive Technology, MYLE, Speech Recognition, Technologies, Wearable Tech |
The high-tech industry has been recently developing at a staggering pace, and more and more new “smart” gadgets hit the market with every new day. November was noteworthy for two interesting announcements made by two top market players.
Both Microsoft and Google stated that by the middle of the next year they each plan to roll out their own wearable devices – the so called “hearables”: Microsoft Clip and some yet . Well, folks, welcome to the club, we’ve been expecting you!
Both devices are advanced versions of Bluetooth microphones that clip on your clothes, hook onto your smartphones and perform a set of voice commands to be executed on your Microsoft or Android smartphones. It’s too early to judge these devices’ functionality and “smartness”, however, we tend to believe they will perform their intended roles well and will be useful to their adopters.
There is a funny thing here for anyone who ever watched that old sci-fi gig, Star Trek, as the devices resemble the famous Star Trek communicator, and also because these devices were announced virtually in the 50th Anniversary of the original movie. Another no less funny coincidence is that the announcements happened four months after MYLE revealed a similar device in its own very successful IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign. Well, we all know that it is indeed a pure coincidence and events are completely unrelated, and I’m absolutely sure that this novel and innovative idea beamed upon MS and Google’s wizards many years ago, and they just waited for the right moment to reveal it…
To be honest with you, it’s really amazing news for the MYLE team because 1) announcement happened at the moment, when market for the “hearables” should start growing; and 2) current tech market is in critical need to raise an awareness for the “hearables” products.
It’s especially great for small start-ups, like MYLE, that create amazing breakthrough products, however don’t have enough resources for a proper product popularization. So, indeed, thank you very much! We’ll return our gratitude by revealing our next steps regarding the design and development of our truly innovative products, and by feeding you with cool and innovative ideas.
But seriously, we truly are grateful! Please, do not be shy and call us anytime – we’d love to help newbies 😉 All the more so that we do have a lot to share and teach.
Virtually, with zero budget MYLE team developed a truly breakthrough wearable device, that works independently without a smartphone or a computer. We developed a user-friendly and infinitely customizable application for it, that’s capable of working with various operating systems, as well as revealed a smart analytical platform that allows users to integrate the “hearable” wearable into any app or a software system that people use for personal and business purposes. Our wearable device only requires a fingertap and a voice note to start filling applications and software systems with data to automatically execute numerous daily routine operations.
Believe us, it is very, very exciting… Well, the excitement is also boosted by the trillion-dollar opportunity!
