Sensory Blog

In the old days of corporate America an “assistant” would bring you coffee. Today the “assistant” is Alexa or Google or some other voice assistant, and they don’t directly bring you coffee…yet. FROM MUSIC TO FOOD ORDERING Over 30% of U.S. adults now have at least one smart speaker, 60% have used a voice assistant on a smartphone, and the…

The IFA (Internationale Funkausstellung) Show occurred this past week in Berlin. It is certainly Europe’s largest tech show, and some would say it has now surpassed the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES). I hit CES every year and this was my second IFA, but something radically changed this year in the world of Voice Assistants. I’m going to make…

At a recent meeting Sensory was credited for “inventing the wake word”. I explained that Sensory certainly helped to evangelize and popularize it, but we didn’t “invent” it. What we really did was substantially improve upon the state of the art so that it became useable. And it was a VERY hard challenge since we did it in an era…

I used to blog a lot about wake words and voice triggers. Sensory pioneered this technology for voice assistants, and we evangelized the importance of not hitting buttons to speak to a voice recognizer. Then everybody caught on and the technology went into main stream use (think Alexa, OK Google, Hey Siri, etc.), and I stopped blogging about it. But…

As more and more devices that are designed to watch and listen to us flood the market, there is rising concern about how the personal data that are collected gets used. Facebook has admitted to monetizing our personal data and the personal data of our friends. Google has been duplicitous in its tracking of users even when privacy settings are…