Sensory Blog

This month Orange decided to stop selling its Djingo smart speaker and it didn’t get much notice. But I think it’s significant. it shows that even a $30 billion telecom giant can’t compete with the likes of Google and Amazon (incidentally they were using SoundHound technology which is about as good a cloud recognizer as an independent general-purpose assistant has…

Speech recognition today works great. Sure, accents create challenges, and signal to noise ratios can make things more difficult, but through the use of deep learned approaches to modeling, we are able to achieve accuracy rates that get well above 90%. When you add a little Natural Language Understanding (NLU) around the voice recognition engine, it is not hard to…

While voice seems to power the user experience of nearly every technology product we own today, 10 years ago the concept of using keywords (now known as wake words) to wake up devices mostly pertained to science fiction. Fast forward to today. Wake words are everywhere, from low-power devices like our smart watches, smartphones hearables, and portable devices, to more…

Can a small embedded custom voice assistant take on 800 pound cloud gorillas? Before answering this and diving into the how, why, and how much, let me backup and talk a little bit about testing and accuracy. Testing speech recognition performance across speech engines in a fair manner is VERY difficult. The tests need to be representative of the real…

Using our hands and bodies has been the dominant means of control since the dawn of time. This of course is natural for activities like farming and hunting and made a lot of sense as service businesses emerged. As our machines got more intricate and complex, touch made a lot of sense for mechanical devices, and interestingly enough even in…