More good news for IPhone - 11/16/08 AA offers iPhone mobileboarding passes

On Nov 11, 1:22*am, Nigel <[email protected]> wrote:
> in article
> bbb0aae2-37e9-44f2-9973-7b23de63b...@h23g2000prf.googlegroups.com, 4phun at
> [email protected] wrote on 11/11/08 1:54 PM:
>
>
>
> > 11/10/08 - Motorola Razr Finally Dethroned!
>
> > IPhone Crowned Top Cell Phone In U.S.
> > and what is even more Amazing Only AT&T Has It!
>
> > By Antone Gonsalves
> > InformationWeek
> > November 10, 2008 08:00 PM
>
> > Apple's iPhone 3G was the best-selling mobile phone in the United
> > States in the third quarter, surpassing former champion theMotorola
> > (NYSE: MOT) Razr, which fell to second place, a market research firm
> > said Monday.
>
> > Nevertheless, the iPhone's popularity among U.S. consumers failed to
> > lift the overall market. Handset purchases overall declined 15% from
> > the same period a year ago to 32 million units, the NPD Group said.
> > Handset revenue fell 10% to $2.9 billion, even though the average
> > selling price rose 6% to $88.
>
> > The Razr was ranked the top-selling consumer handset for 12
> > consecutive quarters. The iPhone's ascension represented a "watershed
> > shift in handset design from fashion to fashionable functionality,"
> > NPD analyst Ross Rubin said in a statement.
>
> >http://www.informationweek.com/news/...ne/showArticle....
> > icleID=212001650
>
> > This report also ran on NPR's
> > All Things Considered 11/10/08
>
> > Poor Verizon, Sprint -
> > No iPhone for you, keep pushing those Razrs ;>)
>
> > On Nov 9, 12:35*am, 4phun <[email protected]> wrote:
> >> MORE GOOD NEWS FOR IPHONE USERS 11/08/08
>
> >> YOUR IPHONE IS FAR MORE RELIABLE
>
> >> SquareTrade Study: iPhones more reliable than BlackBerry, Treo
>
> >>http://www.blogcdn.com/www.tuaw.com/...nctionsmartpho....
>
> >> The report, titled "iPhone More Reliable than BlackBerry, One Year
> >> In", analyzes failure rates for more than 15,000 new cell phones
> >> covered by SquareTrade warranties. SquareTrade found that after one
> >> year of ownership, iPhone owners were half as likely as BlackBerry
> >> owners to have a phone failure, and one-third as likely as Treo
> >> owners.
>
> >> EVEN MORE BREAKING GOOD NEWS FOR IPHONE
>
> >> ANY WEBSITE CAN NOW BE INSTANTLY
> >> IPHONIZEDhttp://digg.com/tech_news/HOW_TO_Instantly_iPhone_ize_Your_Website
>
> >> British developer Jon Wheatley let loose an awesome little tool today:
> >> Intersquash lets you convert any website into an iPhone siteŠ
> >> instantly.
>
> >> Video at link just click through DIGG
>
> No surprise - I hated my RAZR. *Funny to think about the internet experience
> on the RAZR compared to the iPhone - talk about the dark ages. *Long live
> the iphone (until someone makes something even better at least).
>
> Nigel

American Airlines first to offer iPhone mobile boarding passes

In what will no doubt be the first among several who will offer this
(it’s about time!), American Airlines is now the first airline to
officially offer mobile boarding passes at a few airports but it
shouldn’t take long for this to be available at all airports, across
all airlines.

For those who travel frequently, it’s obviously more convenient to
show your iPhone screen rather than looking in your backpack for the
right piece of paper.

Is this the wave of the future? More than likely. American Airlines
started to make this mobile boarding pass option available to people
who travel from Chicago O’Hare Airport, LAX, and John Wayne Airport,
and it is leading the way for all other airlines. More airlines will
probably follow in the near future, and it’s yet another example of
the iPhone’s penetration into the everyday consciousness of business.

This is one of several recent events that could give the iPhone a
commanding lead far over any other cell phone trying to catch Apple.

---

› See More: More good news for IPhone - 11/16/08 AA offers iPhone mobileboarding passes

In article
<[email protected]>,
4phun <[email protected]> wrote:

> American Airlines first to offer iPhone mobile boarding passes

actually they aren't the first. continental has had it for a while and
it isn't just an iphone either.

> For those who travel frequently, itís obviously more convenient to
> show your iPhone screen rather than looking in your backpack for the
> right piece of paper.

it's much easier to show a piece of paper than it is to deal with a
phone which is probably already in a bag for going through the x-ray
machine (can't have it on your person for the metal detector).

the only real advantage is on line check in while traveling and not
having access to a printer, although even that isn't a big deal since
the kiosk will reprint it.

> This is one of several recent events that could give the iPhone a
> commanding lead far over any other cell phone trying to catch Apple.

it's nothing new and it's not iphone specific. long ago, prior to the
requirement to have a boarding pass to enter the secure area, it was
possible to check in via any phone and then show a gold/platinum card
at the gate which the gate agent inserted into the machine and
retrieved the info and printed a boarding pass.

Continental Airlines has had Mobile Boarding pass for almost a year
already, so where does AA get off calling themselves first???

http://www.continental.com/web/en-US...romoCode=A4802

In article <[email protected]>, Ron
<[email protected]> wrote:

> Continental Airlines has had Mobile Boarding pass for almost a year
> already, so where does AA get off calling themselves first???

they don't, nor do they mention iphones

<http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/081113/american_airlines_boarding_passes.html>

On Mon, 17 Nov 2008 04:43:29 -0500, nospam <[email protected]>
wrote:

>In article <[email protected]>, Ron
><[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Continental Airlines has had Mobile Boarding pass for almost a year
>> already, so where does AA get off calling themselves first???
>
>they don't, nor do they mention iphones
>
><http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/081113/american_airlines_boarding_passes.html>


Your snipping the link proving Continental did it last year in 2007,
doesnt make AA first.

http://www.continental.com/web/en-US...romoCode=A4802

"Ron" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> On Mon, 17 Nov 2008 04:43:29 -0500, nospam <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>>In article <[email protected]>, Ron
>><[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> Continental Airlines has had Mobile Boarding pass for almost a year
>>> already, so where does AA get off calling themselves first???
>>
>>they don't, nor do they mention iphones
>>
>><http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/081113/american_airlines_boarding_passes.html>
>
>
> Your snipping the link proving Continental did it last year in 2007,
> doesnt make AA first.
>
> http://www.continental.com/web/en-US...romoCode=A4802

Um, he was SUPPORTING your position, not arguing with you! He merely
pointed out that 4phun's original post was, like most of his rantings,
exaggerated, and provided a link showing that AA's press release did NOT
claim they were first (as 4phun suggested) nor did it say it was for iPhones
only (also as 4phun suggested.)

I guess you're just so used to people arguing with you that you can't
recognize support when you see it!

In article <[email protected]>, Ron
<[email protected]> wrote:

> Your snipping the link proving Continental did it last year in 2007,
> doesnt make AA first.

i *said* aa wasn't first, so there was no need to keep the link, and in
my other reply, i specifically mentioned continental doing it before
aa. i also said it had nothing to do with iphones and actually sounds
like more of a pain than using a piece of paper. sometimes low tech is
the best solution.

November 18, 2008, 12:30 am
Google, iPhone and the Future of Machines That Listen
By John Markoff

How do you talk to a search engine? In Googlish, of course.

Google’s new speech recognition service for the iPhone, which I wrote
about last week and which was released on Monday, understands you most
accurately when you speak to it just the way you enter queries into
the Google search box. That makes sense, because the system’s accuracy
comes from the billions and billions of typed queries that Google has
recorded over the years.
Google’s voice search software for iPhones. (Peter DaSilva for The New
York Times)

So don’t bother with polite formalisms like “What is the best pizza
restaurant in San Francisco?” Simply say “best pizza restaurant San
Francisco.”

After all, you’re talking to a dumb machine — or perhaps several,
distributed across multiple states.

The accuracy is far from 100 percent, and probably not even 95 percent
(Google execs demurred when I asked if they had any meaningful
accuracy statistics). My experience is that it captures your voice
query substantially more than half the time, and that in itself is a
revelation. It also makes the usual sampling of funny mistakes. (My
favorite was my inability to get it to recognize “Camp Unalayee,”
which I attended as a teenager. It would usually respond “Camp
Ukulele.” But heck, unalayee is a Cherokee word that means “place of
friends,” and ukulele is in the dictionary.)

Yet after five days of using the service it still seems better than
any speech recognition system I have used to date. It may even signify
an inflection point — speech recognition that is more useful than
typing.

I was initially intrigued by the Google Mobile App because I have been
following the progress of speech recognition research since the early
1980s. Progress in this field feels like watching paint dry. Yet the
industry’s visionaries have been unanimous in saying that we will talk
to machines — and they will understand us — someday.

It was probably in 1983 that researchers at SRI International
demonstrated how they could control simulated battleships with voice
commands (“go left,” “go right,” “stop,” that sort of thing).
Evolution has been slow because it turns out that recognizing speech
is a really, really hard problem. There are all the complexities of
language, plus accents and background noise.

In the past decade, however, progress has accelerated. The stakes are
very high and there are a number of big and small players. The search
giants Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all believe speech recognition is a
prerequisite for the era of mobile computing. And there are lots of
others including I.B.M., Nuance and Vlingo that are developing speech
technology.

Although Microsoft hasn’t dominated in this area yet, the company has
been investing heavily in research in the field going back to the
1980s. Last year it spent close to $1 billion to acquire Tellme
Networks, a company based in Silicon Valley that supplies speech
recognition for the phone directory and operator assistance market.

“You want to be able to interact with your phone just like you would
with your mom or friends,” said Dariusz Paczuski, senior director for
consumer services at Tellme. “Voice is a great interface and it can
simplify interactions more than anything.”

Everyone agrees that in mobile applications, speech is the obvious
user interface. Whether it’s on a BlackBerry, an Android phone or an
iPhone, typing will always be error-prone and frustrating.

If one company makes a major breakthrough in voice, it is potentially
a major threat to its rivals, because a “speech interface” could
potentially allow one company to simply take over a handheld device
developed by another company.

For some time we seem to have been stuck at the stage where speech
recognition works, but just sort of. Perhaps we are at a moment like
the one when A.T.M.’s were first introduced. At first most people said
they preferred interacting with a human bank teller. Then, overnight
it seemed, everyone realized that the bank teller relationship wasn’t
all it was cracked up to be. Now most of us never set foot inside a
bank. How long before people find that it is more efficient to deal
with a robot on the phone than a human?

Enough with the future-gazing. Right now there is something compelling
about saying “backpacking trails Trinity Alps California,” and being
taken directly to a Web site listing all of the best ones.

If you’ve tried out voice searching with the Google Mobile App for
iPhone, leave a comment and let us know how it went.

On Nov 18, 11:11*am, iPhone 3Gold <[email protected]> wrote:
> November 18, 2008, 12:30 am
> Google, iPhone and the Future of Machines That Listen
> By John Markoff
>
> How do you talk to a search engine? In Googlish, of course.
>
> Google’s new speech recognition service for the iPhone, which I wrote
> about last week and which was released on Monday, understands you most
> accurately when you speak to it just the way you enter queries into
> the Google search box. That makes sense, because the system’s accuracy
> comes from the billions and billions of typed queries that Google has
> recorded over the years.
> Google’s voice search software for iPhones. (Peter DaSilva for The New
> York Times)
>
> So don’t bother with polite formalisms like “What is the best pizza
> restaurant in San Francisco?” Simply say “best pizza restaurant San
> Francisco.”
>
> After all, you’re talking to a dumb machine — or perhaps several,
> distributed across multiple states.
>
> The accuracy is far from 100 percent, and probably not even 95 percent
> (Google execs demurred when I asked if they had any meaningful
> accuracy statistics). My experience is that it captures your voice
> query substantially more than half the time, and that in itself is a
> revelation. It also makes the usual sampling of funny mistakes. (My
> favorite was my inability to get it to recognize “Camp Unalayee,”
> which I attended as a teenager. It would usually respond “Camp
> Ukulele.” But heck, unalayee is a Cherokee word that means “place of
> friends,” and ukulele is in the dictionary.)
>
> Yet after five days of using the service it still seems better than
> any speech recognition system I have used to date. It may even signify
> an inflection point — speech recognition that is more useful than
> typing.
>
> I was initially intrigued by the Google Mobile App because I have been
> following the progress of speech recognition research since the early
> 1980s. Progress in this field feels like watching paint dry. Yet the
> industry’s visionaries have been unanimous in saying that we will talk
> to machines — and they will understand us — someday.
>
> It was probably in 1983 that researchers at SRI International
> demonstrated how they could control simulated battleships with voice
> commands (“go left,” “go right,” “stop,” that sort of thing).
> Evolution has been slow because it turns out that recognizing speech
> is a really, really hard problem. There are all the complexities of
> language, plus accents and background noise.
>
> In the past decade, however, progress has accelerated. The stakes are
> very high and there are a number of big and small players. The search
> giants Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all believe speech recognition is a
> prerequisite for the era of mobile computing. And there are lots of
> others including I.B.M., Nuance and Vlingo that are developing speech
> technology.
>
> Although Microsoft hasn’t dominated in this area yet, the company has
> been investing heavily in research in the field going back to the
> 1980s. Last year it spent close to $1 billion to acquire Tellme
> Networks, a company based in Silicon Valley that supplies speech
> recognition for the phone directory and operator assistance market.
>
> “You want to be able to interact with your phone just like you would
> with your mom or friends,” said Dariusz Paczuski, senior director for
> consumer services at Tellme. “Voice is a great interface and it can
> simplify interactions more than anything.”
>
> Everyone agrees that in mobile applications, speech is the obvious
> user interface. Whether it’s on a BlackBerry, an Android phone or an
> iPhone, typing will always be error-prone and frustrating.
>
> If one company makes a major breakthrough in voice, it is potentially
> a major threat to its rivals, because a “speech interface” could
> potentially allow one company to simply take over a handheld device
> developed by another company.
>
> For some time we seem to have been stuck at the stage where speech
> recognition works, but just sort of. Perhaps we are at a moment like
> the one when A.T.M.’s were first introduced. At first most people said
> they preferred interacting with a human bank teller. Then, overnight
> it seemed, everyone realized that the bank teller relationship wasn’t
> all it was cracked up to be. Now most of us never set foot inside a
> bank. How long before people find that it is more efficient to deal
> with a robot on the phone than a human?
>
> Enough with the future-gazing. Right now there is something compelling
> about saying “backpacking trails Trinity Alps California,” and being
> taken directly to a Web site listing all of the best ones.
>
> If you’ve tried out voice searching with the Google Mobile App for
> iPhone, leave a comment and let us know how it went.

Google is providing iPhone owners with means to search everything they
could possibly want through speech. An update to the free Google
Mobile App will enable it to sense when the user wants to do a voice
search, through the built in accelerometer, according to an YouTube
demonstration of the app.

A NY Times report reveals that Google researchers have achieved this
by adding sophisticated voice recognition technology to the Google app
available for free download via the iTunes App Store. If you need to
find out things, like where is the nearest restaurant, you actually
ask the phone “where is the nearest StarBucks” and Google Search will
instantly produce results. Best of all, the results are based on your
location.

So, whether you live in San Francisco, New York, or UK, the same
question is answered differently by the Google Mobile App, which
senses your location. Not to worry, though - you can still do your
text searches, and even use the app's convenient suggestions and
options to zero in on something.

It has been revealed in the NY Times report that Google’s advantage in
this field is the ability to store and analyze vast amounts of data.
“Whatever they introduce now, it will greatly increase in accuracy in
three or six months,” said Raj Reddy, an artificial intelligence
researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, who has done pioneering work
in voice recognition. “It’s important to understand that machine
recognition will never be perfect,” he added.

“The question is, How close can they come to human performance?”

On Nov 18, 11:25*am, iPhone 3Gold <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Nov 18, 11:11*am, iPhone 3Gold <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
>
> > November 18, 2008, 12:30 am
> > Google, iPhone and the Future of Machines That Listen
> > By John Markoff
>
> > How do you talk to a search engine? In Googlish, of course.
>
> > Google’s new speech recognition service for the iPhone, which I wrote
> > about last week and which was released on Monday, understands you most
> > accurately when you speak to it just the way you enter queries into
> > the Google search box. That makes sense, because the system’s accuracy
> > comes from the billions and billions of typed queries that Google has
> > recorded over the years.
> > Google’s voice search software for iPhones. (Peter DaSilva for The New
> > York Times)
>
> > So don’t bother with polite formalisms like “What is the best pizza
> > restaurant in San Francisco?” Simply say “best pizza restaurant San
> > Francisco.”
>
> > After all, you’re talking to a dumb machine — or perhaps several,
> > distributed across multiple states.
>
> > The accuracy is far from 100 percent, and probably not even 95 percent
> > (Google execs demurred when I asked if they had any meaningful
> > accuracy statistics). My experience is that it captures your voice
> > query substantially more than half the time, and that in itself is a
> > revelation. It also makes the usual sampling of funny mistakes. (My
> > favorite was my inability to get it to recognize “Camp Unalayee,”
> > which I attended as a teenager. It would usually respond “Camp
> > Ukulele.” But heck, unalayee is a Cherokee word that means “place of
> > friends,” and ukulele is in the dictionary.)
>
> > Yet after five days of using the service it still seems better than
> > any speech recognition system I have used to date. It may even signify
> > an inflection point — speech recognition that is more useful than
> > typing.
>
> > I was initially intrigued by the Google Mobile App because I have been
> > following the progress of speech recognition research since the early
> > 1980s. Progress in this field feels like watching paint dry. Yet the
> > industry’s visionaries have been unanimous in saying that we will talk
> > to machines — and they will understand us — someday.
>
> > It was probably in 1983 that researchers at SRI International
> > demonstrated how they could control simulated battleships with voice
> > commands (“go left,” “go right,” “stop,” that sort of thing).
> > Evolution has been slow because it turns out that recognizing speech
> > is a really, really hard problem. There are all the complexities of
> > language, plus accents and background noise.
>
> > In the past decade, however, progress has accelerated. The stakes are
> > very high and there are a number of big and small players. The search
> > giants Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all believe speech recognition is a
> > prerequisite for the era of mobile computing. And there are lots of
> > others including I.B.M., Nuance and Vlingo that are developing speech
> > technology.
>
> > Although Microsoft hasn’t dominated in this area yet, the company has
> > been investing heavily in research in the field going back to the
> > 1980s. Last year it spent close to $1 billion to acquire Tellme
> > Networks, a company based in Silicon Valley that supplies speech
> > recognition for the phone directory and operator assistance market.
>
> > “You want to be able to interact with your phone just like you would
> > with your mom or friends,” said Dariusz Paczuski, senior director for
> > consumer services at Tellme. “Voice is a great interface and it can
> > simplify interactions more than anything.”
>
> > Everyone agrees that in mobile applications, speech is the obvious
> > user interface. Whether it’s on a BlackBerry, an Android phone or an
> > iPhone, typing will always be error-prone and frustrating.
>
> > If one company makes a major breakthrough in voice, it is potentially
> > a major threat to its rivals, because a “speech interface” could
> > potentially allow one company to simply take over a handheld device
> > developed by another company.
>
> > For some time we seem to have been stuck at the stage where speech
> > recognition works, but just sort of. Perhaps we are at a moment like
> > the one when A.T.M.’s were first introduced. At first most people said
> > they preferred interacting with a human bank teller. Then, overnight
> > it seemed, everyone realized that the bank teller relationship wasn’t
> > all it was cracked up to be. Now most of us never set foot inside a
> > bank. How long before people find that it is more efficient to deal
> > with a robot on the phone than a human?
>
> > Enough with the future-gazing. Right now there is something compelling
> > about saying “backpacking trails Trinity Alps California,” and being
> > taken directly to a Web site listing all of the best ones.
>
> > If you’ve tried out voice searching with the Google Mobile App for
> > iPhone, leave a comment and let us know how it went.
>
> Google is providing iPhone owners with means to search everything they
> could possibly want through speech. An update to the free Google
> Mobile App will enable it to sense when the user wants to do a voice
> search, through the built in accelerometer, according to an YouTube
> demonstration of the app.
>
> A NY Times report reveals that Google researchers have achieved this
> by adding sophisticated voice recognition technology to the Google app
> available for free download via the iTunes App Store. If you need to
> find out things, like where is the nearest restaurant, you actually
> ask the phone “where is the nearest StarBucks” and Google Search will
> instantly produce results. Best of all, the results are based on your
> location.
>
> So, whether you live in San Francisco, New York, or UK, the same
> question is answered differently by the Google Mobile App, which
> senses your location. Not to worry, though - you can still do your
> text searches, and even use the app's convenient suggestions and
> options to zero in on something.
>
> It has been revealed in the NY Times report that Google’s advantage in
> this field is the ability to store and analyze vast amounts of data.
> “Whatever they introduce now, it will greatly increase in accuracy in
> three or six months,” said Raj Reddy, an artificial intelligence
> researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, who has done pioneering work
> in voice recognition. “It’s important to understand that machine
> recognition will never be perfect,” he added.
>
> “The question is, How close can they come to human performance?”

Google Voice Search, an early Christmas present for iPhone owners
Mobility
By Christian Zibreg
Tuesday, November 18, 2008 10:17

Mountain View (CA) – Google’s much anticipated voice search
application has finally arrived at Apple’s AppStore. And after playing
with the software for a few hours we have to say that we are deeply
impressed. There is something unique and mind-changing about being
able to pick up the handset, say "movie show times" and receive not
only general search results, but information about movie show times at
theaters in the area of your current geographical location.

Following a weekend of uncertainty and lots of speculation about
growing tensions between Apple and Google, the companies released
Google’s promised voice search iPhone application late on Monday. And
as far as we can tell, the software works just as we were told: You
pick up the handset, say a search query and the application returns
search results in text. "Just hold the phone to your ear, wait for the
beep, and say what you're looking for," wrote Dave Burke, Google
mobile team engineer manager in a blog post. "That's it. Just talk."

Although it was believed that Google would release the software as a
standalone application, the company updated its existing free iPhone
application called Google Mobile App with two new features: “Voice
Search” and “Search with My Location”. Google Mobile App is an iPhone-
optimized front-end interface to common Google services, like search
and maps. It can be used to start a Google search with a single click,
get relevant search and URL suggestions during typing, access past
searches and display nearby business suggestions on a map.

If you have ever worked with speech recognition software before, then
you know how much time can go into training an application to reduce
the error rate of recognized words and phrases. Voice Search does not
need any training. The software uses the iPhone’s accelerometer sensor
to detect when a user moves the handset close to the ear and
automatically switches to "listening mode" (which can be triggered
manually as well, simply by tapping the microphone icon.) Users can
also bring up the virtual keyboard to modify the search terms by
double tapping the search box.

Search with the “My Location” feature allows you to perform a local
search without having to specify where you are. The feature works in
tandem with geolocation features of the handset to deliver results
tailored to your current location. For example, if you pick up the
handset and say "restaurants", "weather", or "movie show times" you
will get corresponding information that is relevant to your current
geographical information displayed on a map. To make this feature
work, the “Location Services” option in the iPhone Settings needs to
be enabled – and users are required to agree that Google Mobile App
can tap into your location data.

So far, we have discovered only two drawbacks. First, when you click
on any search result, the application opens a link in Safari. This
goes against the idea of searching in a single application, because
you have to quit Safari and open Google Mobile App to perform another
search. We would love to see an app built into the web browser so that
we can perform searches and follow links on a results page - all from
within the application.

Second, you can't voice-search contacts in your address book, which is
understandable since the speech recognition feature does not run
within the application, but on Google servers. Also, we have to
mention that Voice Search is currently only available to U.S. users.
iPhone users who do not have an iTunes Store account that is
authorized through a credit card issued in the U.S. will not be able
to download the application until Google releases versions for other
markets.

Overall, this is one of the most useful iPhone applications available
today. It seems as if Google has found a way to remove the
experimental character from voice recognition and finally come up with
a solution that can be used on an everyday basis. A feature like this
on a cellphone would have been considered science-fiction just one
year ago.

It seems that, despite all rumors, Apple and Google are still buddies.
But we do have to say that we are a bit surprised that this feature
was introduced on the iPhone first and not on Google’s own G1 Android
phone sold by T-Mobile.

This is the first step to true and accurate voice recognition and
translation:

1) Google user speaks search string into phone.

2) Google gets it wrong, user corrects Google

3) Multiply by millions of searches daily with constant correction and
feedback from users

4) Perfect voice rec, major profit

There will be a few issues with voice recognition to begin with but as
it gets better and more people use the service and add to the database
with their corrections and add to the pool of variable accents etc the
accuracy will be perfected at an exponential rate.

A similar concept could apply to translations. Once voice recognition
is perfected and becomes the primary search input of choice then more
people will be able to use their phones as direct voice to voice
translators. Obvious translation mistakes will become apparent through
mass use. At every turn users could flag apparent mistranslations and
through the help of the Google Borg accurate translations would
evolve. Much the same way that Wikipedia pages tend to accuracy over
time even with the input of a subset of "disruptive" users.

"Why don't they let more than just iPhone users take advantage of
this, dagnabbit?"

For the same reasons all the nerds despise the iPhone: because of it's
uniformity right across the board, powerful graphics and CPU and
consistent user experience. If you want to debut a powerful
application, the iPhone makes the most sense of any platform.

And given the fractured nature of every other vendors offerings, why
ruin the experiment on crappy inconsistent platforms?

Go with the best, someday release for the rest.

On Nov 18, 12:54*pm, 4phun <[email protected]> wrote:
> "Why don't they let more than just iPhone users take advantage of
> this, dagnabbit?"
>
> For the same reasons all the nerds despise the iPhone: because of it's
> uniformity right across the board, powerful graphics and CPU and
> consistent user experience. If you want to debut a powerful
> application, the iPhone makes the most sense of any platform.
>
> And given the fractured nature of every other vendors offerings, why
> ruin the experiment on crappy inconsistent platforms?
>
> Go with the best, someday release for the rest.

The app is FREE
Google Mobile Voice Search

Plus connection is FREE
Google Mobile Search for the iPhone doesn't require cell minutes as
the voice is transfered via data connection of Wifi or 3G

Plus results are FREE
and results aren't some crappy SMS or MMS message but full graphics
and RTF transfered via data connection again not using SMS units.

> On Nov 18, 12:54*pm, 4phun <[email protected]> wrote:

> > Go with the best, someday release for the rest.
>


Voice in Google Mobile App: A Tipping Point for the Web?
by Tim O'Reilly

As I wrote in Daddy, Where's Your Phone?, it's time to start thinking
of the phone as a first class device for accessing web services, not
as a way of repurposing content or applications originally designed to
be accessed on a keyboard and big screen. The release of speech
recognition in Google Mobile App for iPhone continues the process
begun with the iPhone itself, of building a new, phone-native way of
delivering computing services. Here are two of the key elements:

1. Sensor-based interfaces. Apple wowed us with iPhone touch
screen, but the inclusion of the accelerometer was almost as
important, and now Google has shown us how it can be used as a key
component of an application user interface. Put the phone to your ear,
and the application starts listening, triggered by the natural gesture
rather than by an artificial tap or click. Yes, the accelerometer has
been used in games like tilt, parlor amusements like the iPint, but
Google has pushed things further by integrating it into a kind of
workflow with the phone's main sensor, the microphone.

This is the future of mobile: to invent interfaces that throw
away the assumptions of the previous generation. Point and click was a
breakthrough for PCs, but it's a trap for mobile interface design.
Right now, the iPhone (and other similar smartphones) have an array of
sensors: the microphone, the camera, the touchscreen, the
accelerometer, the location sensor (GPS or cell triangulation), and
yes, on many, the keyboard and pointing device. Future applications
will surprise us by using them in new ways, and in new combinations;
future devices will provide richer and richer arrays of senses (yes,
senses, not just sensors) for paying attention to what we want.

Could a phone recognize the gesture of raising the camera up and
then holding it steady to launch the camera application? Could we talk
to the phone to adjust camera settings? (There's a constrained
language around lighting and speed and focus that should be easy to
recognize.) Could a phone recognize the motion of a car and switch
automatically to voice dialing? And of course, there are all the Wii-
like interactions with other devices that are possible when we think
of the phone as a controller. Sensor based workflows are the future of
UI design.

2. Cloud integration. It's easy to forget that the speech
recognition isn't happening on your phone. It's happening on Google's
servers. It's Google's vast database of speech data that makes the
speech recognition work so well. It would be hard to pack all that
into a local device.

And that of course is the future of mobile as well. A mobile
phone is inherently a connected device with local memory and
processing. But it's time we realized that the local compute power is
a fraction of what's available in the cloud. Web applications take
this for granted -- for example, when we request a map tile for our
phone -- but it's surprising how many native applications settle
themselves comfortably in their silos. (Consider my long-ago complaint
that the phone address book cries out to be a connected application
powered by my phone company's call-history database, annotated by data
harvested from my online social networking applications as well as
other online sources.)

Put these two trends together, and we can imagine the future of
mobile: a sensor-rich device with applications that use those sensors
both to feed and interact with cloud services. The location sensor
knows you're here so you don't need to tell the map server where to
start; the microphone knows the sound of your voice, so it unlocks
your private data in the cloud; the camera images an object or a
person, sends it to a remote application that recognizes it, and
retrieves relevant data. All of these things already exist in
scattered applications, but eventually, they will be the new normal.

This is an incredibly exciting time in mobile application design.
There are breakthroughs waiting to happen. Voice and gesture
recognition in the Google Mobile App is just the beginning.

At 18 Nov 2008 09:40:14 -0800 4phun wrote:
> This is the first step to true and accurate voice recognition and
> translation:
>
> 1) Google user speaks search string into phone.
>
> 2) Google gets it wrong, user corrects Google
>
> 3) Multiply by millions of searches daily with constant correction and
> feedback from users
>
> 4) Perfect voice rec, major profit
>
> There will be a few issues with voice recognition to begin with but as
> it gets better and more people use the service and add to the database
> with their corrections and add to the pool of variable accents etc the
> accuracy will be perfected at an exponential rate.


Perhaps, but only in a *****-checker sort of way. The system will simulate
increased accuracy by replacing non-understood inputwith likely
possibilities based on things most people have searched for, in an "80/20
rule" methodology, "correcting" seldom used search terms you might have
actually wanted, into more popular ones you didn't. (I.e. a query for
"Seratonin" might return "Sarah Palin", since the latter currently gets far
more hits than the former.)


> A similar concept could apply to translations. Once voice recognition
> is perfected and becomes the primary search input of choice then more
> people will be able to use their phones as direct voice to voice
> translators. Obvious translation mistakes will become apparent through
> mass use. At every turn users could flag apparent mistranslations and
> through the help of the Google Borg accurate translations would
> evolve. Much the same way that Wikipedia pages tend to accuracy over
> time even with the input of a subset of "disruptive" users.


True, which will be state of the art until mobile devices get enough power
to handle speech recognition on-board instead of relying on a server. On-
board processing will allow the accuracy to evolve based on YOUR input alone,
rather than the input of the entire "herd" of users.