voice

At CES this year one of the most interesting announcements involved Samsung's Smart Interaction, a new feature on its 2012 TVs that utilizes a built-in camera and microphone to enable you to control the boob tube just by speaking and/or gesturing to it. I've spent the last few days doing just that, much to the amusement of my co-workers, and boy are my arms (and at least one finger) tired.

My takeaway? Smart Interaction has promise but feels half-baked and more like a gimmick than a compelling upgrade. Once the novelty wears off, its usefulness is limited (at best) to those times you don't have a remote in-hand. … Read more

Barely a month after the mobile browser Dolphin debuted Sonar for Android, a feature for browsing by voice command, it has introduced the feature to iPhones without the help of Siri.

Dolphin representative Darren Weiss explained that the Dolphin Sonar (download) partnership arose out of a limitation of developing for the iPhone. "Since there is no native voice API available for iOS, we decided to partner up with Nuance, leaders in the the voice-recognition space." Nuance is best-known for making Dragon Dictate, a PC-based speech recognition program. It also now owns several Android apps including Vlingo and Swype, … Read more

What's in a name? That which we call Siri, by any other name would be as sassy -- though we might have known the voice assistant technology by another name.

NetworkWorld this morning recounts some of the highlights from a speech given by Siri co-founder Dag Kittlaus at Chicago's Technori Pitch event yesterday. While the speech focused mainly on the importance of building Chicago as a startup scene, Kittlaus included a handful of behind-the-scenes tidbits on what led to Siri becoming an Apple technology.

One of those was that late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs originally sought a different … Read more

Remember those fateful words that no kid ever wanted to hear from their teacher: You've got so much po-tential? "Potential" is a compliment when you're just starting out in your field, and veiled disappointment after you've been in it for years. The sentiment describes exactly how I feel about Google Voice.

Let me just say that I've been using Google Voice on mobile since the apps first premiered for Android and iPhone -- and I continue to use it every day on both platforms. In fact, I depend on it for my job.

As a cell phone reviewer, I'm constantly testing new phones. Google Voice gives me a centralized place to access my family and friends' calls and texts. Since they only see the message or incoming call, it doesn't matter which device I use to reach out.

Google Voice has a ton of features, many of them exceedingly useful, like call forwarding, free texts to the U.S. and Canada, visual voice-mail transcription, and international texting.

Yet messaging delays, lack of MMS support, the iPhone app's instability, and the Android app's incomplete integration into most devices weigh it down (Sprint's Android phones are a partial exception for the last point.) As for those tragicomic garbled voice-mail transcriptions I've spoken about before, I've simply come to accept them.… Read more

According to a new study, most people who have access to Apple's Siri voice assistant think she's just fine -- they just don't want her around all that much.

As part of its quarterly "Market Focus" report, Parks Associates today said that in a polling of 482 iPhone 4S owners in the U.S., more than 50 percent of respondents said they were "very satisfied" with Siri. About a fifth of the group said that they were simply "satisfied," and some 9 percent said they were "unsatisfied."

According to … Read more

Sprint's reign as the only carrier to integrate Google Voice into its cell phone service could be coming to an end.

"We are having discussions with other carriers about this," Vincent Paquet, Group Product Manager for Google Voice, told CNET in an interview. He declined to name specific carriers.

Google's Paquet added that the existing partnership, which lets Sprint customers easily turn their handset number into a Google Voice number, has been successful.

Google Voice gives users access to visual voicemail that you can read on the phone or online, personalized greetings, and cheaper international calls, among other perks.

Although anyone can port their phone number to a Google Voice account, Sprint's offering doesn't include the $20 porting charge, is simpler to set up online, and let you unlink the Sprint phone if you already have an account. … Read more

Video chatting in Hangouts is busting out of Google+.

Video calls among two or more Google+ users was the big draw when Hangouts launched, but now Google has flipped the switch the allow Google+ users to make phone calls to almost any phone number, not just within the Google+ ecosystem. That means that users will be able, for example, place a voice call from their computers and reach friends or family on their land line or cell phone.… Read more

If you use Google Voice, and you have Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on your phone, life is going to get a little bit more practical.

Starting now, you'll be able to view and play visual voice mails that you receive from Google Voice right in the phone's native call log. The feature only works on Android smartphones running the latest version of the operating system, and only if you head over to the Google Voice app settings and turn on "Voicemail display."… Read more

Should you trust that official-sounding guy on the phone trying to talk you into transferring cash from your account to his? Well, we're going to go out on a limb here and say no, but in case that's not so obvious, new voice analysis technology out of Japan promises to help spot the scammers for you.

Nagoya University and Fujitsu have created software they say can automatically identify situations in which one party might "overtrust" the other. It does so by detecting changes in voice pitch and volume level that can occur under psychological duress.

By combining this technology with keywords such as "indebtedness" or "compensation" that are characteristic to a specific type of remittance-soliciting phone-phishing scam called furikomesagi, the researchers have developed a setup now being tested in collaboration with the National Police Agency of Japan and the Bank of Nagoya. … Read more